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Re: Arabic input via WebObjects?
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Re: Arabic input via WebObjects?


  • Subject: Re: Arabic input via WebObjects?
  • From: Steven McDowall <email@hidden>
  • Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 09:08:16 -0500


Hi Sako!


You mean on the same page he can use 5 diffrent languages? and what language
do you presnet your site?
however,..



Yes, we must be able to accept "on the fly" any of the above languages for input. The presentation language is also at the option of the user, but currently limited (just due to translation efforts) to English, German, French.





Now, the odd thing, for those who don't know it -- is that Hebrew and Arabic are both Right-to-Left (RTL) languages, meaning that the input text fields should start with the cursor to the right most and then proceed left (keeping the text right justified).

I have never seen this in a web application before.  Just my lack of
knowing probably.

The other interesting thing is that on a given field, it is unknown
ahead of time if the input will be LTR (ISO-LATIN) or RTL (Hebrew/
Arabic), so the user needs a way to "switch" input modes "on the fly".


He has this Switching modus. it depends on the keyborad and OS user uses.
This is not the server problem. WebObjects on the client site is only HTML
so no diffrences between it and php for example.



So to a certain extent -- its also browser dependent, isn't it? And how the browser interfaces to the OS and keyboard. That makes sense.




The backend DB w/ be UTF-8, so should have no problem on storing, but also wondering how things like "searches" would work.

UTF-8 is not enugh for db. at least not for arabic (i tested it under
ms-sql). use Unicode.


Again, this is strange (separate thread). UTF8 is just an encoding, its still unicode at its heart.





Any ideas, comments, places to look would be welcome.

Your problem is deffnitely not on the client site. when user writes arabic
this will work fine. depends on the browser as i hint a little before. some
browsers do not do the job properly. However, its not ur problem.
on the db just use unicode (nVarChar) for examples insteed of (VarChar) ,
etc...
Searching in the DB? forget it. There is no problem :)
You will face problems in java (just an idea). Inform me about the results
(just curious ;) ).


Something is still not quite jelling for me. Lets say we have a typical "records" type system where they have some data entry form where they can do the normal Change / Add / Delete.

So -- new empty form. The user, by switching input modes (somehow) types data in : Name 1 in german and Name 2 in arabic. We store the data on the db.

The enter a second record -- this time both NAME 1 and NAME 2 in French.

Third record -- both NAME 1 and NAME 2 in Arabic.

Now, lets say we have a "List" screen which shows the records in the DB where they can see and select one to edit.

How in the world am I going to display the names correctly, given that some are in LTR (German/French) and some in RTL (Arabic)?

Proper formatting would have the LTR names left justified and the RTL names Right Justified within the columns..

Seems to me the app will have to have special knowledge of which fields can be RTL and LTR and have special CSS or table formats or whatever to justify the names correctly for display based on the content, but that also seems a bit tricky.. Maybe not.

I also think searching CAN be an issue -- lets say we allow them to search by partial last name

Well -- if its an Arabic search, we need to tell the DB (unless its really smart) to match at the END of the string, where as in German/ French/English it matches at the start of the string..

Something like:

WHERE LAST_NAME LIKE "$search%" for RTL (to search the start of the string)
WHERE LAST_NAME LIKE "%$search" for LTR (to search at the end)


??


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