about Arabic translation

[Omar_Gamer]

i am just asking about support for it. when?

also i want to be a reviewer in transifex Arabic team there a lot of mistakes in reviewed strings

thanks  

[sanderd17]

A decent solution will take a long time to implement. There were some experiments with pre-processing the files to change the order of the characters. But even when that's a done, the current text rendering code lacks kerning, and I heard that is quite important for Arabic.

Implementing kerning in the current text renderer will be too hard, and it would be better if we'd switch to standard text rendering engines (Pango and related). But that is also a lot of work.

So unless someone suddenly drops by and starts working on this, it can't be expected anytime soon.

Edited March 26, 2017 by leper
s/Tanto/Pango/

[GunChleoc]

How far along are you with reordering the characters in the code? Reordering the characters is easy, the ligatures are what makes it complicated. The harfbuzz library would probably be the smartest way to go. We ship our own at Widelands, feel free to take -  it's GPL v2+.

How do you do your font rendering? SDL_ttf can handle the kerning just fine.
 

Spoiler

As you can see, mixing Arabic with Latin still has some vertical alignment issues in Widelands, but the kerning looks fine to me.

I'd be interested in helping, but it might be a few months until I find the time - I have my fingers in too many pies.
 

Edited March 27, 2017 by GunChleoc

[feneur]

At the moment the text in the game is basically an image (the engine takes a font file and generates a bitmap with all the letters/numbers, I don't know how complex things it can do when generating it/reading from it, but I do know that limits things quite a bit ), so it's probably best as Sander says to remove our current and integrate an existing rendering engine.