[mapserver-dev] Re: Arabic encoding in Mapscript

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 11/28/2010 11:58 PM, mapsab wrote:
>
> Thank you Mr.Steve for your prompt reply.I tried your suggestion by  using
> MS Arial font(ARIALUNI .ttf) which is almost 23 Mb size with UTF-8
> encoding.But the result was same,that is some unreadable characters,even not
> Arabic.But when i changed the encoding to 'Windows-1256' ,it shows some
> Arabic text ,but not in a joined way.But when I tried to extract the data
> from the same layer and displaying in a dropdown box, using Mapscript API,it
> is giving the correct data in Arabic.So I think the problem in map
> rendering.For showing Arabic text does it require to recompile Mapserver
> with fribidi-0.19.x? Since I am  a beginner in Mapserver ,I don't know how
> to compile it.Can you guide me for  this?(I am using C#mapscript with
> asp.net).

Hi Sabu,

I can't help you much on Windows maybe some one else can help. I would 
suggest starting with MS4W which has the correct version of fribidi 
built into it.

You Arabic text in the popup works because that is "text" that is being 
rendered by the browser.

In mapserver you need to the encoding of the character encoding of the 
data, the ttf file and the ENCODING string are all correct. I have 
always converted all the data to be UTF8 and then used the ARIALUNI.ttf 
and have gotten reasonable results, but I don't read Arabic so read 
"reasonable" with as appropriate.

-Steve W