The Right To Left
Amir Dotan, Mushon Zer-Aviv and Naim Kamel have started a petition called The Right To Flash. Its goal is to convince Macromedia to fully support the Unicode standard related to bidirectional languages in Flash. As you might have read also in my blog, you run into serious problems if you try to use languages that are written from right to left like Arabic or Hebrew.
I think this is an issue that needs to be adressed soon, as it is really discriminating a big group of the world's population. And even if you ignore the cultural aspects of this you cannot deny the marketing and financial aspects. It may sound like a cliché, but what I really like about this action is that Jews and Arabs are working together on this. Please sign it.
Posted at July 20, 2003 04:18 PM | Further reading
Hi Mario, have you read my comments in previous iterations of this discussion, where I point out how apps rely on system customizations for RTL? Do you have ideas on how to handle such displays on non-compliant systems?
tx,
jd
Of course I've read that John, but I still think that it should be possible to implement the BiDi algorithm - if not for non-embedded fonts, then at least for embedded ones where flash has the full control over the text.
Thanks for posting this, Mario. The community's support on this is invalueable. Please tell other bloggers about this.
Mr. Dowdell, with all due respect (no-pun), I could mail you a javascript port of the algorithm... :-).
What I'm trying to say is that I'm sure you guys can work it out.
Cheers, Elor.
Mr. Dowdell wrote:
"Do you have ideas on how to handle such displays on non-compliant systems?"
Why not ask Adobe? Thier products (Photoshop ME, InDesign ME etc.) work fine with RTL on both Mac and Windows for years already. I find it hard to belive that text oparations in Flash are more complex then in InDesign.
As for Linux, since you can't create flash on linux, that is not a problem. And anyway, applications like OpenOffice and Mozilla (not to mention Gnome and KDE themselvs) show that you can handle Hebrewe properly in unix, so yes, it can be done, and it has been done- many times over.
Good to see guys are serious on RTL languages in FLASH. I started initial work in developing text box component for Flash (using TTF font) , hope to finish it when I will get some time.
Thanks
Naseem
http://www.geocities.com/naseem_amjad/
