Celestial Software

Have you considered adding support for Farsi?Dave,

I've never tested with Farsi data, but AbsoluteTelnet is written to handle most unicode data and displays most things pretty well. Of course, some scripts present additional challenges (such as ordering and shaping) that require additional processing.

There are no character set translations in Absolute that specifically handle legacy Farsi data, but if your data is in UTF8 format, it will at least try.

I'll do some testing and let you know what I find out.

Dave,

I've been doing some testing with Farsi data and things look pretty good. It's close enough to Arabic that it works pretty much the same, with additional characters as you said. In my sample data, only one character didn't display, but that's mostly a font issue. I would assume that the PCs used by a Farsi-speaking user would have a selection of Farsi fonts that I don't have, including fixed-width ones required by the terminal client.

Brian

Thx Brian,

Actually, we are trying to avoid Unicode for various reasons. One being that our applications databases use fixed-length text fields, and storing unicode would require 2 data characters per printed character.

So far we're satisfied with the Arabic capabilities of Absolute, and are starting to look for Farsi fonts, e.g. at
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/nes115/farsiabroad.htm
We're not sure yet whether there are non-Unicode ones available, but it would make sense that some of the non-unicode Arabic scripts could be easily modified for Farsi.

d.s.

You can avoid UTF8 if you wish. Win1256 seems to cover both Arabic and Farsi characters. Just set Win1256 in the AbsoluteTelnet options panel and you should be good.

As for fonts, Unicode fonts would be preferred. Internally, AbsoluteTelnet supports only unicode data. The font selection has no effect on the data received from or sent to the host. AbsoluteTelnet will make the proper conversions. The tricky part about fonts is finding one that is fixed-width that the terminal can use.

Searching.....

Brian

I installed the Persian language interface pack to try to get some additional fonts (Fixed-width persian fonts are not easily found). To my surprise, Windows rebooted and the entire interface was now in Persian! It took me a minute to uninstall it, but I'm back to normal now.

Still looking for fonts...

Brian

Dave,

I found and fixed the problem in 6.28. I had incorrectly linked to Fribidi 1 which does not include shaping. 6.28 corrects this by linking to Fribidi2.

http://www.celestialsoftware.net/telnet/AbsoluteTelnet6.29.exe