One of the best things about Qt4 is it’s great support for non Latin scripts. The classes are called “The Scribe Classes” and they are well documented in Qt4’s documentation. katePart has been ported to use those classes in a very early stage, and in theory kate4/kwrite4 should support BiDi in a very good way. In practice it is not the case.

In practice, the direction of the paragraphs was inherited by the layout system. This means that if you are using kwrite in RTL mode (in Hebrew or Arabic user interface, or just passing the –reverse command line) text (specially code, wich is damn ugly!) will be displayed in RTL mode, which is bad. Another bad thing is that RTL paragraphs are not right aligned (the direction was RTL but they were left aligned) and this is also bad.

The fix was actually pretty trivial, when you sit and learn how Qt4 handles text, and I already commited it to the SVN and it will be part of KDE4.1. I also coded a new method which tries to detect the best direction for the paragraph not based on the first strong character, but it scans the whole line, and detects which language is more dominant in that paragraph/line. We have this code in konversation (KDE3) and Thomas Zander has implemented it also in KWord (KDE4), so I think it’s tested enough and safe to use.

As always, mandatory screen shot:

If you want to know how to screw your users, please follow Mozilla’s path, and close HUGE AND ANNOYING BUGS 6 years after it’s been opened. Yes,it’s finally done, and I can copy text in Firefox trunk. Yay! I will be able to copy/paste in Firefox 4! yes! (BTW, on my Firefox, from Ubuntu 7.10 this is not working, I wonder what’s happening in 8.04).

Dear KDE: please, pretty please, integrate webkit into KDE 4, so I can stop using FF. Thanks.

I got a mail from an old friend of mine, saying that he wishes to close debian/#427835. It seems that he is a DD, and he will be my private DD, YAY! He already has given me a lot of changes, which got uploaded to our repository.

Then I decided to check what Ubuntu has to offer, and I found Daniel Rocher’s page, with his “debian” package. How sweet! I incorporated his changes as well.

Then I decided to fix all Lintian fixes, and now I have a working Debian package which Mohamed will hopefully upload ASAP, and Daniel will also upload it to the next Ubuntu version. Again, sweet!

Please, pretty please, if you are working on a QDevelop package (for whatever distribution!) please subscribe to our mailing list and do tell us! We would really like to know how this package doing in the distros, and we can sometimes even help.

Konsole was kinda borked for Hebrew/Arabic/Farsi users in the last weeks. This is the before image:

This was bug 156654 which was fixed by revision 766384. And here is how it looks today on my desktop:

Sweet, now I have a working Konsole once more
Robert, you are my weekend hero, I am sorry I did not know about that QPainter::drawText() voodo you used, otherwise I would not bother you with that. Now I am smarter. Thanks again!

Dear lazy web, 2 questions:

Question 1: as I have just recently bough a Nokia E65 (hmmmmm….) I would like to know how to sync the contacts and appointments to Kontact. Email is not interesting (IMAP/GMail is going it already). Contacts and appintments/TODO is what I need. The system is KUbuntu 7.10, please don’t ask me to install anything outside the repositories.

Question 2: it would be cool if the phone can be used as bluetooth mouse. Installing a small Java application on the phone is quite OK by me.

thanks

Well, an old friend of mine has been broken. Sweet, one person less to world domination…

MSameer: did you upgrade to the version of GNome in which they (finally) use the real DPI collected from X instead of hard coded 92…? this might explain why you see small fonts.