أرابيكا:How to edit Arabic pages

For starters : If youre not used to working with Arabic on screen — some basics ought to be useful. One, the right to left script mechanism works almost perfectly, with a couple bugs — notably that in the edit menu, the Navigation bar can get overlapped by the edit window. The solution to this is twofold - first make sure your fixed font size is reasonably small — but Arabic seems hard on the eyes if too small so a windowfix is probably in order to get the balance to where larger sizes are accomodated, for ease of editing, while keeping the text better confined to the window.

The second thing to watch out for is the length of lines — since Uni-code can stretch the screen-width, and since these font sizes are going to be larger than with Latin-based ones, there needs to be some moderation as far as line widths go — be certain to use returns for lines, — dont worry about extra line space until you get the hang of it.

All you Arabic readers already know most of the issues dealing with web-based content — if you can communicate in English also, dont hesitate to join the international wikipedia mailing list, and the main wikipedia-l mailing list, as well as the wikitech mailing list — for technical issues.

this is the way to stay in touch with the other mor active wikipedias — to coordinate technical issues and grow the Arabic Wikipedia into what its destiny as the dominant, free, open-to everyone Arabic Encyclopedia in the world — we hope to make some technical advances soon that will permit us better inter-language translation of articles.

Technical issues

The HTML looks backward, on the screen

This, when cut from the Mainpage:

{???ARABIC TEXT}

will appear quite normally on a notepad window (except for the Unicode, of course)

{???ARABIC TEXT}

The real issue with this is the reverse-intuitive typing of html links, and the near - impossibility of getting them to look like normal on the arabic screen — it doesnt matter — type them in as normal, and get used to then looking somewhat abnormal. Use preview a lot to make sure it works.

THE NEXT PROBLEM is similar, having to do with the wikilinks, via the counterintuitively entered brackets.. once again, something needing getting used to.

ARABIC is a phonetic abjad, which means that the vowels tend to be dropped, and then are intuitively understood according to some of the basic rules. There are vowels, and vowel sounds.. and these come in the form of four different super and sub-scripted marks, and though to the Arabic reader, seem elementary, can still be used to describe the sound your trying to make. — Put the English word next to it in (parentheses) if you like, and

INPUT METHODS - the crudest would be a cut- and paste method. I reccomend babeltype.exe as a good free all around windows based character map reader. On the site [1] you will find a useful tool if you can't produce Arabic characters on your computer.

The most promising development seems to be VIM's integration of arab-specific features in bersion 6.2... so much so that the Arabic mod project for vim closed up shop and says just use 6.2... the problem is that there are font issues, as far as i can tell.

TRANSLATION

For simple English to Arabic translation — http://www.almisbar.com/salam_trans.html looks like the only one out there. The other one looks highly problematic. Be sure to simplify your English first - translate in small chunks — the smaller the better — go over your text to make everything written out, oversimplified if need be. Its better that the point be made, and that someone with better Arabic skills can come around and edit the page, rather than having it be completely unintelligible.

Note — be sure to get all the Arabic text when translating - particularly the ALEF, which looks like a tall stick -easy to miss.

Sandbox is a page destinated for experiments.