[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Arabic in Evergreen

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 11:06:05AM +0300, Christoph Schilling wrote:
> Hi,
> I looked at the mail archive and found that there is no support for
> arabic in evergreen though three years ago I thought I heard that
> evergreen would support also Arabic with unicode.
> 
> I tried to create a Marc record in Arabic. The problem seems to be the
> joining together of  the Arabic letters.
> When I looked at already existing Marc records from the library of
> Congress the same picuture: the letters are in the right order, but they
> are not joined together.
> 
> Are there any plans to add the possibility of Arabic Marc records to
> Evergreen?

Hi Christopher:

Can you can help us help you, by providing:

1) Some sample Arabic MARC records (ideally, licensed so that we can
add them to our test datasets)

2) A screenshot of how the text in the records should appear (perhaps
copy the text into a text editor or whatever application displays it
properly).

3) A screenshot of how Evergreen displays the MARC record for
comparison.

We have some ideas about possible reasons for the problems that you're
seeing (NFC vs. NFD normalization forms, or the fonts used in the
default Evergreen displays), and given good sample MARC records to work
with and a target to shoot for, we might be able to provide a solution
quickly.

Of course, I can't make any promises! But it's worth a try.

Dan