[mapserver-users] UTF-8 right to left text

[Ian Walberg]

Steve,

Many thanks for getting back to me.

We have built with that version of fridibi and do get some text labels
displaying correctly.

The source data is from an excel spread sheet which we export to CSV and
import into the SQLite DB.

The plan tomorrow is to find a couple of good and bad labels and follow
these through to see if we can find where there are differences, I
looked last week at the hex codes for a good and bad name but did not
come to any clear confusion.

Does fribidi need  RTL code to display the text correctly? Do you know
how to decode that from the hex?

Regards

Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:mapserver-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Stephen
Woodbridge
Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2012 8:52 PM
To: mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [mapserver-users] UTF-8 right to left text

On 2/26/2012 10:39 PM, Ian Walberg wrote:
> Hello lists,
>
> We cannot get all our Arabic text labels to display correctly, it 
> appears that the incorrectly rendered text is not being drawn right to

> left. Some work and others do not.
>
> Our assumption is that there are some non displaying codes we are 
> missing but we do not know enough yet to work out if this is the case.
>
> The data is in an sqlite database using an OGR connection.
>
> Any ideas or experience that you can share would be fabulous.

Ian,

You need the follow pieces to get this to work:

1. make sure you have built mapserver with fribidi-0.19.2 2. you need a
ttf that supports the character set you are using
    - I always make sure my data is in UTF8
    - and I have a unicode arial.ttf font from Windows 3. make sure your
LABEL block has ENCODING "UTF8" in it
    - assuming your data is in UTF8

On Linux you can do:
$ dbfdump myshapefile.dbf > aaa
$ file aaa

and it will tell you what the encoding is.

Issues that I have run into are:

1. data with mixed utf8 and other encodings like Window-1256 or
ISO-8859-6 2. In UTF8 data there are a lot of glyphs that are connecting
characters or non printing characters and many fonts do not have glyphs
defined for these characters which typically causes a square box to be
displayed.

-Steve W
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