Hi,

I am Iranian living in the US. I have a Persian weblog and I would really like to be able to browse Persian web sites, write comments in Persian and update my weblog in this language. This could be a great feature for Maemo and N900 too if they support right-to-left languages such as Persian, Urdu, Hebrew or Arabic.

I should also mention that, I am a programmer myself. I am in fact a Java enterprise architect. So, I might be able to contribute for this effort if the support is not there yet. Of course, it has been years that I haven't done any C/C++ programming but it should be easy to pick up if you guys help me for the OS side.

Please let me know...

Thanks,
-Sami

Here are links to two threads. The other one is about supporting Arabic and the other one is about Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Forgive me my ignorance here, I don't know how much Persian and Arabic differ from each other but maybe you find these helpful anyway.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33538

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33956

And welcome to the forums!

Thank you jsa,

I went through those two threads. In fact Persian and Arabic are two different languages with some similar letters and words (can compare it with English and Greek). In Persian we have 4 more letters that Arabic people can't normally read, write or pronounce:
- G (as in Gap)
- P (as in Park)
- Jh (as in fusion = fee-yu-jhen)
- Ch (as in child)

Anyway, since I don't have the device yet (waiting for it to be released in the US), is there a simulator or SDK for developing programs under Maemo using a PC?

I found some good info on the Chinese link that qgil sent in the other thread. If there is a simulator for PC, I can start looking into it right away.

Thanks...

Maemo5 SDK is available at
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Doc...atforms/Maemo/

I always like it when people refer to "Persian", very old people that live in Mesopotamia?

I would guess he means Iranian Farsi ;-)

But on a less pointless note, does the n900 not support the "arabic" alphabet?

I hope it does! http://www.saafpureskincare.com/ar/ (still WIP)
If it doesn't and anyone needs any input or help I'm more than willing

@deadmalc: Please see jsa's answer here and the thread he linked to.

Thank you Andre.

I also found more stuff here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Docs_and_Code/

But without a simulator and the device, it should be difficult to write test any program.

I guess I have to wait for my N900 first.

@dealmalc

It's off-topic but I answer your question. Believe it or not, I usually call the German language as "German" when I speak English although the German calls it Deutsch. I also call Arabic as Arabic in English, although they call it as arabi themselves.

sami: You can still write the app in the SDK without having a device (it's the only way anyway) and others might take a look at testing it...

Usually displaying i18n data is much easier and comes as an out-of-the-box feature because the OS understands Unicode and the browser is also able to render those texts.

i18n for Persian requires many features:

1- an on-screen Persian keyboard (software)

2- making the physical keyboard able to enter Persian texts (OS)

3- shortcut and combination keys (e.g switching between languages)

4- keyboard labels: this could be fixed with some transparent labels. For example, Persian letters could be printed in another color so both the letters are visible.

5- supporting right-to-left display (the browser already supports this one) and input fields.

6- Calendar, Date/Time format, Currency and Numbers.