Arabic language
Arabic is fully supported in many Linux distributions. There is much less support for other languages using the Arabic alphabet, such as Farsi in Iran; Azeri in Azerbaijan; Pashto, Dari and others in Afghanistan; and Urdu and others in Pakistan. The letters for all of these languages and more are included in Unicode.
Debian Arabic keyboard
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ] د ج ح خ ه ع غ ف ق ث ص ض ط ك م ن ت ا ل ب ي س ش ظ ز و ة ى ﻻ ر ؤ ء ئ
Requires Arabic font and correct right-to-left rendering to display properly.
Unicode
The Unicode block for Arabic is U+0600-U+06FF. There are two other blocks for Arabic Presentation Forms. They are included in Unicode because they were present in earlier standards from other sources. Almost all of these forms can be generated by software that correctly handles Arabic ligatures. The forms that cannot be generated in the desired manner in word processing software should normally appear as graphics anyway.
Arabic Support Task List
Linux Arabic support is in a good shape overall today. The following is a list of what is left to do, or what needs to be done beyond existing support to allow OLPC to seamlessly useable by an Arabic-speaking child. If you know of existing solutions to address any of this list, please add it to this page so that we end up with as comprehensive a list as possible.
On the other hand, the best thing you can do to help if you have the needed skills, is to take ownership of any of the following challenges or point out existing solutions:
- Bugs in linux arabic support and open source libraries
- There is no actionable list of bugs in linux and open source libraries
- Arabic text normalization (Search engines, spell checking)
- Open source f
- Support applications
- Open source OCR solution
- Spell checkers
- Arabic content
- Wikipedia
- Localized or natively arabic educational content
Fonts
The following Free TrueType/OpenType font packages include Arabic alphabet for Arabic and other languages.
- Arabeyes 39 Arabic fonts
- Dejavu
- FarsiWeb, for Farsi
- KACST, from King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology
- MPH 2B Damase
- Nafees, for Urdu
- Paktype Naqsh and Tehreer, for Urdu
We need some knowledgeable people to try all of these out in the languages of interest, including at least modern Arabic, Qur'anic Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi, Azeri, and Hausa, and tell us how we are doing and what more we need.