AraMosaic

The Arabic Mosaic Browser


Introduction


LangBox International is specialized in the Arabic support for UNIX Operating systems and applications. The LangBox team has been involved in several projects related to Arabization with constructors such as Silicon Graphics or SunSoft. After having seen several complains about the lack of Arabic Web Browser from our customer and on the ITISALAT mailing list, we decide to investigate in the domain of Arabic Web support on UNIX platform.

The only solution we found for UNIX is the very known PMosaic product and its Trilingual support (English/Persian/Arabic), but unfortunaly which don't support the ISO 8859-6 encoding codeset.

In order to contribute to the Arabic standard support on Internet, LangBox International technical team and its management has decided to study the Arabization of NCSA Mosaic using the XLANGBOX-ARA development package and to offer the result of this job to the UNIX Arabic User community. The experience of LangBox International in the Arabization process of applications and the knowledge of all its related issues has resulted in the delivery of the version "1.0" of AraMosaic.

AraMosaic is an enhanced NCSA Mosaic 2.7b4 Unix/X11 WWW browser supporting Arabic and English text. like PMosaic, AraMosaic is considered derivative work, and its distribution and use are subject to terms set forth by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois who have ownership of NCSA Mosaic. Press here to read copyright.

AraMosaic supports bilingual English/Arabic HTML documents sent from WWW servers to browsers using the standard HTTP protocol. The documentation/use of AraMosaic presume that you are already familiar with the WWW and NSCA Mosaic use. The actual basic codeset for Arabic HTML documents read and displayed by AraMosaic is ISO 8859-6. AraMosaic upon receiving bilingual hypertext will properly layout the text and images on the screen. WWW browsers which lack the ability to display Arabic upon receiving such a document will either display 8bits European characters. Yon can see a sample screen session by clicking here.

AraMosaic has been enhanced using the XLANGBOX-ARA Development environment. This version includes only the HTML page localization in Arabic, but menu, help messages or input area widgets (like "Find in Current" menu) might be also easily localized by using XLANGBOX-ARA Arabic Motif library. Also, this version might not cover all Arabic language specific problems, but tries to fix major of them :

AraMosaic is only available for Unix/X11 platforms at this time, however here also LangBox International is willing to provide solutions for PC/Windows and Mac in the future.


Getting/Installing AraMosaic


AraMosaic is available via anonymous ftp on the following sites :

AraMosaic is provided in binary form for the following systems:

You must download the file corresponding to your Operating system with FTP as well as the README.FIRST file which details the installation process.

Then, the steps to install AraMosaic are the following:

AraMosaic has added Arabic fonts to your. Also included for SunOs X11 systems is a XKeysymDB file to resolve Motif key bindings if warning messages result upon execution. See NCSA Mosaic FAQ for more info. To test for correct installation you may view the test file provided.

If you just typed "aramosaic HTML/AraMosaic-sample.html" or click here (only if you run AraMosaic), you will see the document in Arabic. Here is a sample screen output image of an AraMosaic session. See NCSA Mosaic documentation on how to use the Mosaic web browser itself.

If upon execution, three warning messages are displayed:

Warning: Could not open font "-lbi-nashki-r-...-iso8859-6". Using fixed instead.
Warning: Could not open font "-lbi-nashki-r-...-iso8859-6". Using fixed instead.
Warning: Could not open font "-lbi-nashki-r-...-iso8859-6". Using fixed instead.

this means that the fonts were not installed correctly and you will see European characters instead of Arabic. Check your installation and the install.sh script file. You can check the Arabic fonts availability by running :

In the worse case, you must run manually the command :

You can then check/see ISO 8859-6 Web pages on the WWW. Like NCSA Mosaic, this assumes direct access to Internet from your station.

We are trying to list some ISO 8859-6 Web sites on our Server, please check.


Features


New menus have been added to NCSA Mosaic 2.7b4. They are:

Mosaic HTML widget display has been enhanced to support :


Bugs/Limitations


Please report bugs to us first, NCSA Mosaic 2.7b4 is quite stable and any core dumps are mostly likely due to our additions. If the bug is confirmed not to be from our areas, we shall inform the already too busy NCSA team.

Known bugs/limitations:


Using XLANGBOX-ARA to create Arabic HTML files for AraMosaic


Creating Arabic hypertext files which AraMosaic can display is quite easy. Arabic HTML is no different than standard HTML. Simple begin by creating ISO 8859-6 text section encoding using any of your favorite tools. Since XLANGBOX-ARA encoding uses this character codeset, users can use axmedit to edit/add Arabic text in HTML document.

You can also uses any other Editor from the market that support this codeset (this is the case for the Arabic Mac tools).

Also, by the merge of using the Arabic Motif library of either ALM under Silicon Graphics IRIX or XLANGBOX-ARA under Sun Solaris, AraMosaic can handled and display Arabic menu labels as well as bilingual Input areas in the HTML document. It become possible to search for an Arabic string within an HTML document for example or to fill a CGI form with Arabic data.


Technical Aspects


AraMosaic Beta 1.0 supports as it's default encoding ISO 8859-6, the current ISO character set for Arabic encoding. The lower 128 reflect 7 bit ASCII, and the upper 128 encoding are used to represent Arabic. If you are Arabic User, you might already be familiar with this codeset. This limits HTML documents to Bilingual documents and in any cases, but this the case for all ISO 8 bit codeset applications. This may change in the future if the default character set might be UNICODE (ISO10646) and AraMosaic will only display Arabic or Latin if the recognized characters are encoded in the Arabic code page.

We were first trying to reach the "Transparency" use of Mosaic, and that why we haven't modifyed or extended the HTML language with some additional markup. However, we are following all discussions done on the Bilingual/Multilingual WWW support, as well as other similar work such as PMosaic and we are aware of the need to extend also the HTML to include new markup such as Charset, Language, Direction... in order to complete AraMosaic. Providing a Web Browser BIDI extension should be closely linked with the extension of the HTML language in order to define additional features:

For Other Browsers, currently our XLANGBOX-ARA X11/Motif library allows users to display ISO 8859-6 HTML pages under Netscape 2.0, but the cursor pointing or selection feature cannot be handled by a solution located only at the X11 level. The Main HTML widget window needs to be modified to support Right-to-Left orientation languages (i.e. display, cursor pointing, selection highlighting). The <select> <input>... widgets should be directly handled with the Arabic Motif library of XLANGBOX-ARA, since it seems that they are not Netscape built-in widgets, but OS libraries calls.

We are also examining the plug-in feature possibilities in order to realize this support from outside Netscape. However, handling this within the Netscape main HTML widget should be more efficient and elegant. In addition, such a Plug-In should handle all the HTML language elements, such as Java, HTML 3.0, Animated Gifs..., which not really the purpose of our contribution.


Comments


Feel free to send your comments, feedback, questions and reviews to aramosaic@spartacus.com.

Last Time Modified : July 5, 1996
LangBox International technical Team