Topic: Arabic language support

Hello,

I recently bought the Sony Dash. Please tell me how can I add Arabic language support so that I can view my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Thanks!

Re: Arabic language support

Bump!

No replies? I know it's gonna be very hard to find a none stereotype out there.

Re: Arabic language support

The Sony dash is not a chumby product - you need to post your request on Sony's forum.

Re: Arabic language support

Faire enough (although the OS is Chumby)

I will eventually return the Sony Dash. Is there a Chumby product that supports Arabic?

Re: Arabic language support

The Falconwing (aka Chumby One) could be hacked to support Arabic, at least in the Control Panel.  It doesn't come out of the box supporting it, but the instructions for how to do it are here.

Basically, you'd have to create a font with the correct glyphs, then translate the text.  We have tested translations with non-western glyphs and non-left-to-right, including Korean, Japanese, and Hebrew, and it works.

This would not affect widgets - they'd have to be modified to support Arabic.

Re: Arabic language support

I am not asking to Arabize the Chumby and its menus. I only want the Text coming from Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to display Arabic as my feeds from these Applications are originally a mix of English, French and Arabic. In other words, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube all suppport Arabic. Your Widgets should display the language accordingly.

Just imagine if all Egyptians (around 80 Millions) bought Chumbies? Supporting Arabic would open new doors for your Business across the whole Middle East. Just think Business-wise.

Re: Arabic language support

Ah - that would be up to the widget developers to add the font and glyphs to the widgets in question.  The Flash Player used by the chumby is perfectly capable of handling Arabic - but the level of support within each widget is up to the widget's author.

Re: Arabic language support

Duane wrote:

Ah - that would be up to the widget developers to add the font and glyphs to the widgets in question.  The Flash Player used by the chumby is perfectly capable of handling Arabic - but the level of support within each widget is up to the widget's author.

Darn! Now I have to go after each Widget's developer sad

Re: Arabic language support

stein - are you holding Chumby responsible for independent third party developers choosing to not include the appropriate fonts in their applications?

Chumby has provided all of the technical infrastructure to support international fonts - in fact, you can see several widgets in the catalog, particularly in the Japanese section, that do precisely that.

Re: Arabic language support

Duane, really appreciated that fast responding.

But I have done internally search both in Wiki and forum, still cannot get a clue.

What I want is just to display the song name(e.g. in Chinese) from in NAS folder, which can now be listed in My music files...

Re: Arabic language support

Ah OK - that would be pretty easy with Western fonts.  The problem with Chinese and Japanese is that the fonts are *huge* - larger than would reasonably fit in the memory of a device like this.

Let me take a look to see what it would take to get My Music Files to handle this a bit better.

The original thread was about fonts used in third-party widgets on the Sony dash.

Re: Arabic language support

I just took a look to see how Android handles this - they include over 14MB worth of fonts - 5MB alone just for Chinese, and another 1.2MB for Japanese.  We don't have the RAM to load all this up and unpack it for general free-form text and still be able to do much of anything else.  Android seems to load and cache individual glyphs on-the-fly, but unfortunately, Flash (at least Flash Lite) seems to take an all-or-nothing approach.

Re: Arabic language support

still donät understand, would that be possible to use USB memory( which I am running my debug... script)? i.e. save the huge font file there and let Chumby access it?

Re: Arabic language support

It still needs to be loaded into RAM.

15 (edited by stein 2011-11-06 11:30:58)

Re: Arabic language support

So you mean, Japanese is possible. So how to make this happen then?
I have some titles in japanese still not able to display.

Re: Arabic language support

Basically, you'd follow the instructions here, except that you don't provide any actual translations (unless you want to).

The basic steps are to create a SWF 7 file containing the font containing the character set you want to use (you should include all of the Latin-1 characters, plus the extras), create a flashplayer.cfg file that tells the Flash Player about the new font, then a translation.xml file that will trigger the Control Panel to use it.  I *think* that the "My Music Files" will use the new font - the rest of the CP was explicitly tested for that, but I'm not sure that QA tested that particular section.

17 (edited by stein 2012-10-18 09:57:36)

Re: Arabic language support

Hi Duane,

I read the instruction in your link@wiki, and made the 3 files and cp to their locations:
-  /mnt/usb/translation.xml
- /mnt/usb/languageFile.xml
- /psp/flashplayer.cfg
All 3 files are in UTF-8 and unix format.

- /mnt/usb/fonts.swf (see pic_1 below, embeded all CJK characters, built a text field with Chinese font named "msyh")

(reboot)

I noticed the fonts of control panel changed, e.g. music source list.(see pic_2 vs. pic_3:original  font without USB)
I have changed the line in language_file.xml for <ts o='DONE' t='ENOD'/>

"ENOD" to "??" (chinese)

But all the DONE buttons are not displaying text. (ENOD was OK)

Also I have changed the line in translation.xml
<translate fontName='msyh'  languageFile='/mnt/usb/language_file.xml'/>

Anything wrong? Please advise.

thanks.
---------------
pic_1:PunBB bbcode pic_1 
pic_2:PunBB bbcode pic_2 pic_3:PunBB bbcode pic_2

Re: Arabic language support

Hmmm, interesting - it's pretty clear that the font is being correctly substituted, but it *appears* that the font is slightly larger than the stock version.  If the Chinese glyphs are much larger than the Roman glyphs, then you might have to adjust the height of the text fields.

Try adding a

fontHeightAdjust="150"

attribute to the translate.xml file.  If that works, adjust it down to the lowest value that still works.

19 (edited by stein 2012-10-17 23:25:00)

Re: Arabic language support

Still not working, in fact I see the font size has no change (also I change to fontHeightAdjust='75').
Is it correct (single line)? :

/mnt/usb/translation.xml :

<translate fontName='msyh' fontHeightAdjust='150' languageFile='/mnt/usb/language_file.xml'/>

Re: Arabic language support

Hmmm, I don't know - we successfully shipped Korean and Japanese builds using this technique, so I don't know why it's not working for you.

Re: Arabic language support

Duane wrote:

Hmmm, I don't know - we successfully shipped Korean and Japanese builds using this technique, so I don't know why it's not working for you.

could you share the files so that I could test locally in my CHUMBY?

thanks...

Re: Arabic language support

I'll see what I can dig up.

Here's what I'd try to test this

1) Try the font substitution with some other more conventional font, to test that that's truly working.
2) Try a font with a smaller set of non-ISO characters, such as Hebrew

What I suspect is going on here is the the font itself may be too large - you might see an error message if you launch the Control Panel from a console.  As I recall, in the case of Japanese, we had to also allocate more memory to the Flash Player to hold the extra data for the font _ I think the default is something like 32MB for everything in the "master" partition, so if your font is more than a couple of MB, then it probably won't work.

How big is the font file?

23 (edited by stein 2012-10-18 13:22:14)

Re: Arabic language support

the font file msyh.ttf is 21 Mb
the fonts.swf with the font embed is 4 Mb.
---------
I use Marcomedia flash 8 to generate the flash of fonts.swf:
- dynamic text
- font selected msyh
- "anti-alias for animation"
- embed: Basic Latin, Japanese(all), Korean(all), simplified Chinese(all)

The fonts.swf(4mb) can be displayed using profile.xml as "mixed local widgets into the channel"

Still don't understand why the file size matters if all in a USB stick, I have put the fonts.swf there too.
----
also, I don't know if I should do something like:

CustomFontMap name_of_sans,name_of_serif,name_of_typewriter

in the /psp/flashplayer.cfg?
==========================

I tried your advice to build a new fonts.swf
with the font "Times new Roman" with Latin & herbrew embeded
I edit translation.swf:
<translate fontName='times' fontHeightAdjust='150' languageFile='/mnt/usb/language_file.xml'/>

But cannot see the font for "CANCEL" and "music source" changed. But same as my previous setup.

Re: Arabic language support

The size of the font file matters, since it uses RAM when loaded.

Note also that the font SWF file *must* be exported as a Flash 7 SWF only.

I've sent you an example translation with a custom font to your forum email address.

25 (edited by stein 2012-10-18 13:34:52)

Re: Arabic language support

Thanks Duane!

I tested your files. It did change the font of control panel.

http://i50.tinypic.com/15yyi40.jpg

But same as you said, it only "translate" the word of "night", AND in 3 squares(as you see from the screenshot), which means not interpreted.  The word "channel" was also defined to translate. But not done. why? I use windows7/Flash8/notepad++, within language.xml, the herbrew text for "channel" can be display, while "night" is not displayable and 3 squares.

Do you have "night" in Hebrew in your control panel?

BTW: why can't I open the fonts.fla in flash 8 to edit?  2ndly, I found something relate to Japanese translation:
HERE

The file flashplayer.cfg looks like:
http://i45.tinypic.com/2czz8i.png


What is CodePage 12 for? I tried this line also, no effect for me.

Best regards

Stein