gar wrote:
> I'm working on a project involving production and translation of
> documents from English to Arabic and sometimes the other way around.
> This involves 20+ people scattered around the world. Up to now we've
> used MS Word. Version control has been a nightmare.
No matter what version control system you're using, as long as you're
using MS Word it will always be a nightmare (kind of), because you can't
merge MS Word documents in an easy way.
> Today I make the pitch to the manager that we migrate to Subversion
> (tortoiseSVN client) to handle VC and XML as our data format. This
> will work fine for English, but we also need Arabic support. I can
> handle translating the UI strings, but currently Subversion doesn't
> seem to like log messages in Arabic. I haven't tried using Arabic for
> properties yet.
Aren't the log messages shown in arabic when you use TSVN? If not, how
do they show up? Maybe you have to choose a different font in the
settings dialog (to a font which has arabic chars in it).
> So my question is, can somebody familiar with the code give a rough
> estimate of the number of programmer hours it would take to provide
> Arabic support? It is possible I'll be able to get some (modest)
Subversion can handle UTF8 files very well. In fact, Subversion works
only with UTF8 strings internally. So all comes to your setup (correct
locale set, fonts able to handle arabic chars, ...). You might end up
with problems if you use normal ASCII files with an arabic encoding, but
only when showing the file contents - you will never loose data or find
that some chars in your files changed unexpectedly.
> funding, so if you're interested and available please let me know. No
> promises though at this point; I just think there's a very good
> business case that funding open-source Arabization of subversion and
> tortoiseSVN is the best way to solve our version control problems.
> This is something we would need relatively quickly, in the next few
> weeks if possible.
>
> We also need a diff tool that understands Arabic. I would appreciate
> any time estimates for this too.
I'm not sure, but isn't arabic written from right to left? In that case
just translating the strings in TSVN won't help much. Yes, the chars
will show up correctly, but still be shown from left to right. To
achieve RTL we'd have to create a new set of resource files where all
the dialogs have the RTL flag set. Not much work for one release, but a
pain in the ass to keep up with the changes we're doing while developing...
About TortoiseMerge (the diff tool that comes with TSVN): as long as the
files have the UTF8 BOM's in them, the chars will show up correctly (if
you've set a arabic char font). But again, the right-to-left problem
will still be there. I think I can add a button wich will switch the
TortoiseMerge views from RTL to LTR and vice-versa. Will take some time
though...
Stefan
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Received on Mon Nov 29 20:00:17 2004