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DovGrobgeld · 08-23-2011, 01:51 AM

As my wife just got a Samsung Galaxy S2, I decided to learn a bit about android and E-readers. As you have mentioned earlier in this thread, FBReaderJ indeed does not support Hebrew, and after examining its open source code in Java I understand why. Fixing it isn't completely trivial due to its architecture (it's drawing a word at a time from the left to the right). On the other hand the desktop version of FBReader in C++ does support Hebrew (using "my" library FriBidi :-) and as it's architecture seems quite similar between the Java and the C++ versions, I think the easiest solution for Hebrew would be to simply copying over the bidi changes.

Once the RTL is solved (which is sufficient for Hebrew), it should be quite trivial to add shaping which is needed for Arabic. Not sure whether there are any Java libraries for it or whether the best is to use JNI and fribidi (which has shaping), HarfBuzz, or Pango. We'll see how much time I'll have to play with this.

Once I have something available I'll put it on github and will post in this forum.

08-23-2011, 01:51 AM	#57
DovGrobgeld Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2011 Device: android	FBReaderJ and Hebrew As my wife just got a Samsung Galaxy S2, I decided to learn a bit about android and E-readers. As you have mentioned earlier in this thread, FBReaderJ indeed does not support Hebrew, and after examining its open source code in Java I understand why. Fixing it isn't completely trivial due to its architecture (it's drawing a word at a time from the left to the right). On the other hand the desktop version of FBReader in C++ does support Hebrew (using "my" library FriBidi :-) and as it's architecture seems quite similar between the Java and the C++ versions, I think the easiest solution for Hebrew would be to simply copying over the bidi changes. Once the RTL is solved (which is sufficient for Hebrew), it should be quite trivial to add shaping which is needed for Arabic. Not sure whether there are any Java libraries for it or whether the best is to use JNI and fribidi (which has shaping), HarfBuzz, or Pango. We'll see how much time I'll have to play with this. Once I have something available I'll put it on github and will post in this forum.