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Free Linux Arabic Web Browser
Last Update: October 10th, 2000
Original page location : http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla
(Arabic Version)
- The AraZilla
product idea was born after receiving several complaints
and requests from Arabic Linux users about the lack of
an Arabic Web browser on this platform. Therefore, leveraging
the strengths of the XLANGBOX-ARA
product available on the Linux platform (which provides
an Arabic Operating System Support Level), and in the
same way that it had done for the old AraMosaic
support, the LangBox team has decided to merge both the
Mozilla product and
the XLANGBOX-ARA Arabic
Tool Kit for Linux product, to provide a Free Arabic Web
browser to the Linux community. After this implementation
based on in-house Arabic libraries and system support,
the next step is to participate in the Linux part of the
general BiDi
Mozilla project, which today mainly focus on the Windows
platform support for both Hebrew and Arabic
XLANGBOX-ARA is a commercial
product set of library, but in order to use AraZilla, LangBox
International agreed to provide a free
license of XLANGBOX-ARA for personal, educational, and
non commercial usage on the Linux environment.
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Enjoy.
- 10 Oct 2000 - Announcement and Download availability
- Build 20001010
- 30 Jun 2000 - AraZilla Alpha release for Linux
- Build 20000627
- 30 May 2000 - First internal release at LangBox
office.
Download and Install the lbi-8859-6.8x fontset:
http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/linux/arafontfull-1.2-4.i386.rpm
Download the AraZilla Linux Tarball binary:
http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/linux/arazilla-i686-pc-linux-build20001010.tar.gz
Installation notes:
http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/install.html
Subscribe for getting news on development, status...:
http://www.langbox.com/subscribe.phtml
(check AraZilla item)
Mozilla patches (for developers):
http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/patches
You finds problems / bugs or you have questions or comments:
- subscribe to arazilla-L-request@langbox.com
by putting "subscribe" in the subject.
- describe your point or your suggestion to arazilla-L@langbox.com.
Some famous Arabic web sites:
AraZilla additional menus:
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| By default, without DIR tag, the global direction
is LTR |
You can force dynamically the Global screen direction
under the view menu. |
The RTL forced direction result is as follow: |
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Some additional menus to force the charset (is not
set in the META tags of the HTML source) |
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Search on the Internet:
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| Enter: Linux <AlrGr> |
Enter: gdk;s hgl,ru lpd,dhj |
Press Search |
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Keyboard layout mapping:
There is 2 built-in keyboard layout under AraZilla
: they are usable by setting the AR_KBDLAYOUT environment
variable:
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1- Default Arabic MS Windows keyboard
: AR_KBDLAYOUT="mswin"
[Default]
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2- XLANGBOX-ARA Arabic keyboard Layout:
AR_KBDLAYOUT="asmo"
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Chat and Chatzilla
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By just selecting the Task./ IRC Chat menu, you can
activate chatzilla
which allows you to enter Arabic text...
The commands are of course remaining in latin:
- /server xxx
- /nick yyy
- /join #channelname
- ...
But you may switch to Arabic keyboard to enter your
data - By default, the codeset used for exchange data
is ISO-8859-6,
but you may select the Windows-1256
from the View/Encoding menu.
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Arabic User 1 |
Arabic User 2... |
The AraZilla is an extension of the Mozilla
code with the LangBox's XLANGBOX-ARA
Arabic toolkit for UNIX. This developement has been achieved
on the Linux platform. - The following feature are supported:
- X11 Arabic fonts additional package,
- Left-to-right / Right-to-Left screen dynamicaly switching,
- Arabic Encoding codeset selection,
- Cursor management and Text selection,
- mail/news support included,
- composer support included,
- ChatZilla support included,
- Virtual Keyboard resources,
Check the Mozilla
site and documentation first,
Check the AraZilla FAQ for basic
questions...
Host Operating Systems Consideration:
The target development Operating System platform is a
SuSE 6.3. However, we
will list here the Os on which AraZilla has been tested
by users. If you ran it on a non listed OS, please inform
us.
- SuSE Linux 6.3
- SuSE Linux 6.2
- RedHat 6.1
Mozilla Consideration:
The actual Mozilla target milestone is a M17. The build
is done with the IRC extensions.
Document Charset:
There are several charset commonly used on the web for
Arabic languages. We decide to support the following:
- Unicode : See http://www.unicode.org
- This is the de-facto standard for the Gecko layout
engine.
The Meta Tag in the HTML header is as follow:
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8">
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- ISO-8859-6 : See http://www.langbox.com/codeset/iso8859-6.htm
- The Meta Tag in the HTML header is as follow:
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-6">
- It is international standard adopted by the Arab Community
as well under the UNIX X11 and Mac environment. It is
common used in many web site, such as :
- Windows-1256 : See
http://www.itsnet.com/~qamus/codepages/codepage_win95.htm
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- The Meta Tag in the HTML header is as follow:
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1256">
- It is the code page Window used for font, and supported
by many web site, such as most of site developed or hosted
under Arabic Windows environment...
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Mail Charset:
By default AraZilla uses UTF-8 as Mail Charset since it
is de-facto standard common to all platforms.
Front-End Font Encoding
- For Arabic, there not really a Font Encoding definition,
just because even if the codeset have been defined and
fixed, the font itself must include much more glyphs than
can appear in the codeset. This is due to the "glyph shaping"
characteristic of the Arabic language. So according the
different Software implementation, we can find different
font set definition.
Since the Front End and GUI interface is handled by the
XLANGBOX-ARA libraries and routines, the easiest fontset
support for this product is :
A set of font following this fontset is available by loading
arafontfull-1.2-4.i386.rpm
Reference
and Related Specification
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Mozilla related project
W3C Documents:
RFC:
Character Sets:
- Unicode 3.0
- ISO 8859-6:1987
- Code Page 1256 Windows Arabic
Related Engineering Information:
Related Information and Resources:
- Compose Mail window crash in RTL mode : bug
41685
- Printing support under development, not yet done.
XFE fonts:
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- http://www.langbox.com/AraZilla/linux/arafontfull-1.2-4.i386.rpm
- http://www.langbox.com/bidimozilla/fontXFE
(See README file)
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