Hi Armelle, Koha fully supports UTF-8. It is possible to use Arabic language characters in records ... see: http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23750 It's also possible to have Arabic branch names / patron names, etc: http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl (see the 'location' drop-down box). However, as I understand it, Arabic is a highly inflected language and unlike English, there are cases where the articles (in English a, an, the) are combined with the base of the word. A good Arabic search engine would need to parse words like that, remove the inflected forms, and find records that have the same word bases. Of course, I'm drastically oversimplifying the process :-). That said, the current 2.2 serias of Koha cannot handle that kind of search complexity without a serious investment in programming resources. This will get considerably easier in the 3.x series of Koha when we begin using Zebra. With Zebra, you can define that kind of indexing behavior in a simple configuration file, which will greatly reduce the difficulty of implementation. Another component that must be considered when dealing with the Arabic language is the right-to-left preference. I'm guessing that our templates would need to be re-vamped to accomodate that reading style. So ... I hope all of this is making sense. I'm not an Arabic speaker (though I do have a background in linguistics), so if you know of other considerations, or if I've misrepresented the language's requirements, please let me know. Sincerely, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 12:17:42PM +0200, Armelle Nedelec wrote:
Hello
I've heard that a team is working on arabic in Koha. Do you know of it and would it be possible to contact (and help) them ?
What's the current status of utf-8 and Koha ?
Regards Armelle Nedelec Consultant
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