Hello,

I wonder if anyone has been successfull in viewing text written in Arabic letters using OWB 1.9 ??

I copied several Fonts to SYS:Fonts

When OWB is started it tells me that it is is updating its font data.

But still no Arabic letters can be shown, instead there are ? marks or empty spaces.


I tried several free Arabic fonts. And yesterday also Arial Unicode MS. Its a font from Win XP sized 23 MB (!) and it definately contains all arabic letters !

Maybe its just not a matter of installing the right font ?

I haven't tested arabic fonts. There could be several reasons to fail though:
- in tab/window titles, there's no hope to have them displayed. MorphOS GUI doesn't support unicode, and arabic can't really be converted to classic charsets.

- in webview, if the text appears invisible, it's probably because arabic has to be rendered through a "complex rendering" method that is not implemented in cairo font backend. I might try to see what it looks like when disabled, but i fear it won't be too good (assuming it even works at all). Implementing the complex rendering mode implies switching to pango font backend, which could be possible, but i fear some speed penalties with it (and it also needs some work to get rid of gdk deps).

You can see the problem in wikipedia:
Hebrew works (right to left, 1 case)
Arabic fails (right to left, 4 cases)

Another feature request:
Safe save of bookmarks.html,
I've lost the file two times because of full volume

I wrote a workaround to avoid complex rendering for arabic and other cases giving issue (like http://www.mentor.com), and it displays something, at least (that's with the default webcore fonts, nothing more was needed).

But this workaround obviously means ligatures are ignored. Better than nothing, I guess.
Using Pango might still be an option, but it needs more investigation.

> I wrote a workaround to avoid complex rendering for arabic and
> other cases giving issue (like http://www.mentor.com)

Thanks for addressing the issue mentioned there. Seems my worry that you'd ignore it were unfounded ;-)

Arabic language should work, almost they works correctly in OWB 3.27 with latest ICU Data (on AmigaOS4)

My guess is that OS4 port also enforces the simple codepath, considering that http://www.sand-labs.org/owb/browser/trunk/BAL/Fonts/WebCore/AmigaOS4/BCFontAmigaOS4.cpp
DrawComplexText is unimplemented.


[ Edited by Fab on 2010/10/9 23:23 ]

Don't feed that old commits, they are too old as Joerg stop to commit his changes at a certain point (more or less 1 year ago)

Our latest version is based to Sand-Labs's revision 1466 (not the very very latest but not too old !)

Yes, but i doubt the DrawComplexText is implemented anyway. But that's "fine" to fallback to simple mode. It's better than invisible text for sure. :)

Sure, expecially for me that i need Arabic from time to time

I heard that there is an OWB version 1.11 ? Does it contain already some changes to support Arabic text or "just" other changes ?

1.11 will have that workaround, but it's not released yet. If you absolutely need it, i can send you the test version, though.