Re: [Koha-devel] Information on arabic and Unicode on Koha

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi Armelle,

Koha fully supports UTF-8. It is possible to use Arabic 
language characters in records ... see:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23750

It's also possible to have Arabic branch names / patron names,
etc:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl
(see the 'location' drop-down box).

However, as I understand it, Arabic is a highly inflected 
language and unlike English, there are cases where the
articles (in English a, an, the) are combined with the 
base of the word. A good Arabic search engine would need
to parse words like that, remove the inflected forms, and
find records that have the same word bases. Of course, I'm
drastically oversimplifying the process :-).

That said, the current 2.2 serias of Koha cannot handle
that kind of search complexity without a serious investment in
programming resources. This will get considerably easier in 
the 3.x series of Koha when we begin using Zebra. With Zebra,
you can define that kind of indexing behavior in a simple
configuration file, which will greatly reduce the difficulty
of implementation.

Another component that must be considered when dealing with 
the Arabic language is the right-to-left preference. I'm
guessing that our templates would need to be re-vamped to
accomodate that reading style.

So ... I hope all of this is making sense. I'm not an Arabic
speaker (though I do have a background in linguistics), so
if you know of other considerations, or if I've misrepresented
the language's requirements, please let me know.

Sincerely,

--
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
address@hidden |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 12:17:42PM +0200, Armelle Nedelec wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I've heard that a team is working on arabic in Koha. Do you know of it and 
> would it be possible to contact (and help) them ?
> 
> What's the current status of utf-8 and Koha ?
> 
> Regards
> Armelle Nedelec
> Consultant
> 
> 
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