Write behavior using the keyboard switching key on XO

[reuben]

"On bilingual XOs, the times/divide key is replaced with a keyboard switching key."

On an XO with an Arabic keyboard. Open Write. Type some words. The words appear in X language. Press the keyboard switch key..You expect words to be written in Y language but the result is garbage. Close Write. Open Write. Type some words. The result is Y language. Press the keyboard switch key. The result is garbage. Close and Open Write and the result is X language. Essentially, you must close and reopen write whenever you want to use the keyboard switch key.

This is difficult to reproduce if you don't have an XO with a bilingual keyboard. Does anyone have any hints how it could be reproduced with a normal US/Intl KB?

This has been a long standing bug. It is a high priority for deployments in the middle east. A bounty (TBD) for the resolution of this bug may be offered.

[reuben]

Sayamindu,

Any suggestions on how to make forward progress on this?

Thanks

Reuben

[sayamindu]

I think I have a fix (or at least I know what is going wrong). I will test a bit more and talk to the upstream AbiWord developers.

If you can, in a 8.2 based build, download and install ​http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/abiword-renderfix/libabiword-2.6.5-4.olpc3.i386.rpm The command would be

rpm -Uvh http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/abiword-renderfix/libabiword-2.6.5-4.olpc3.i386.rpm

and test if it works for you as well.

[sayamindu]

The diagnosis of this problem is described in ​http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11785#c3

[reuben]

This appears to have made switching layout much better. A couple things I noticed after installing the RPM that may be other bugs:

-Open Write. Don't type anything press Enter. You'll notice the left justification changes and the left margin is about a 1.5 in away from edge.

-Switching to arabic does type R-L but the justification does not change.

-What should the expected behavior be when switching between roman and arabic alphabets? For instance, I type several roman characters then switch to Arabic and the characters appear before the the roman characters not after..

[sayamindu]

Replying to reuben:

This appears to have made switching layout much better. A couple things I noticed after installing the RPM that may be other bugs:

-Open Write. Don't type anything press Enter. You'll notice the left justification changes and the left margin is about a 1.5 in away from edge.

-Switching to arabic does type R-L but the justification does not change.

Yeah - I noticed this too. Closing Write and opening it up again works.

-What should the expected behavior be when switching between roman and arabic alphabets? For instance, I type several roman characters then switch to Arabic and the characters appear before the the roman characters not after..

I _think_ that is the correct. But I think it's best to confirm this with a native speaker.

I'm trying to see if the justification issue persists in the newer Abiword - if it does not, I'll try to backport it to the 8.2.1 builds.

[sayamindu]

It looks like the justification problem only occurs if the locale is set to Arabic. In a non Arabic locale, typing Arabic works fine.
This happens with the latest stable version as well.

[greenfeld]

The upstream bug says the fix to this was backported to 2.8.4.

OLPC's 11.3.0 os5 build contains libabiword 2.8.6.

This probably needs to be retested.