right to left in docproj

[bkouhi]

Hello all,

As you may know, some languages are written from right to left. For example Persian, Hebrew and so on. How can I change the text direction to RTL? I'm unable to find something about this in the official documents.

 

[cpm@]

@bkouhi,

There are applications that support RTL and Bidi, e.g., if you want to use Persian text in terminal you can use x11/mlterm.

About FreeBSD documentation project in Persian:
http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/FreeBSD-Farsi-Persian-Documentation-Translation-Project-td4099526.html.

 

[bkouhi]

Ok, thank you @cpu82.

Let me expand that a little more. Suppose that I have the following book.xml. Sorry for UTF-8 characters.

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
  "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">

<book lang='fa'>
  <bookinfo>
    <title>یک کتاب نمونه</title>

    <author>
      <firstname>نام شما</firstname>
      <surname>نام خانوادگی شما</surname>
      <affiliation>
        <address><email>foo@example.com</email></address>
      </affiliation>
    </author>

    <copyright>
      <year>2013</year>
      <holder>اطلاعات حق تکثیر</holder>
    </copyright>

    <abstract>
      <para>اطلاعات مربوط به کتاب شما</para>
    </abstract>
  </bookinfo>

  <preface>
    <title>مقدمه</title>

    <para>اگر کتاب شما ک مقدمه دارد در این قسمت بنویسید.</para>
  </preface>

  <chapter>
    <title>فصل اول</title>

    <para>این اولین فصل کتاب است.</para>

    <sect1>
      <title>اولین قسمت.</title>

      <para>این اولین قسمت این کتاب است.</para>
    </sect1>
  </chapter>
</book>

I have some problems with this book.xml:

1. The build system simply rejects my book.xml and says that:

...
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:16:E: non SGML character number 134
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:20:E: non SGML character number 133
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:27:E: non SGML character number 134
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:29:E: non SGML character number 136
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:37:E: non SGML character number 140
/usr/local/bin/openjade:/usr/doc/fa_IR.UTF-8/books/handbook/book.xml:10:42:E: non SGML character number 133
...

2. I need to change the text direction to Right-to-Left. So the readers can read it easily. In HTML, most of tags have an attribute named dir. But how about SGML DocBook?

Unfortunately, there's no FreeBSD Persian Documentation Project.

 

[cpm@]

In XML, the entire range of Unicode characters is available to you, but in SGML, the declaration indicates what characters are valid. The distributed DocBook declaration doesn't allow a bunch of fairly common 8-bit characters. You can fix this by converting them to character entities or by changing the SGML declaration.

If ISO-8859-1 doesn't contain valid characters, probably you have to set the file's encoding to UTF-8.

Add this line in the header of book.xml file.

[B]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>[/B]
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
  "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">

<book lang='fa'>
  <bookinfo>
    <title>یک کتاب نمونه</title>

<snip>

This post explains how to set text direction for any XML parameter.

Unfortunately, there's no FreeBSD Persian Documentation Project.

Contact them

admin@freebsd.net.co
armin.rezayati@gmail.com