We have a C nurses based application (runs on most flavours of Unix, but we favour RHEL). We've got Unicode support in there, but now we have to provide a Hebrew version of the application. Does anyone know a process we could go through to convert the program? It mainly gets and stores data from Oracle, which can support Hebrew, so there should not be a problem there. It really is just the display of the text that is the issue.
+1
A:
It is important to know what terminal they are using because that defines how you should write the code. Some terminals support BiDi(ie bidirectional text). That means they automatically turn Hebrew/Arabian text backwards.
It has its own problems, you can check what your app would look like using mlterm. Basically it reverses the lines that contain hebrew text while keeping what is interpreted as English characters LTR. A Hebrew character printed to 10,70 will appear in 10,10. You can use Unicode LTR RTL to try to force direction for things that break your formatting, but at least on mlterm while they work, they print garbage characters.
If they use regular terminals with unicode support, however, you should roll the characters yourself. Then of course if it is run on bidirectional terminals the text would be backwards again and the format lost.
jbcreix
2009-09-02 02:04:14
Thank you - I think we will guide our customer towards the terminals that do it automatically. It seems that putty is capable of this as well.
Greg Reynolds
2009-09-03 08:31:13