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About 18 hours ago I was told about
The Open Group, and their technical standard on
Context-Dependent and Directional Text.
I've only had time to read the first 25 pages, but I've realized it's a very important document for XOOPS core developers (and others) to read.
The technical standard (ISBN 1-85912-142-X January 1997), is a very detailed standard which in 90 pages describe most problems with multilanguage systems supporting the so-called bidirectional text. It's available online for free in both html and pfd.
To download, go here:
http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/c616.htm.
Supporting a multitude of languages is much more complex then I initially thought. The above mentioned work, introduces the most problematic written systems, which is Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew, Yiddish, Thai and Korean - several is not directly described, but covered by the others - they include Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Sinhaese, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Mongolian, Chinese and Tibetan.
It reveals many important things - most of which will have to go into the XOOPS core to give it it's best impact on the overall system.
The pdf document is only about 90 pages, and introduces many c-functions dealing with the problems faced by applications in order to store data in a search and display-able manner.
Best regards.
