Dear Slackers,

It seems to me that the main idea behind slackware was stability and security, but it seems asian/arabic language support wasnt a priority.

To begin with, none of the available browsers can read any arabic page, instead what you get is....just squares and tiles. I have KDE internationalizations and konqueror which was still ineffective. I dont know any other way to takle to problem of opening up arabic pages. It would be nice for anyone who has been faced with a similar problem that may be web or nonweb related to give me a helping hand.

Yours Truly,

Another Slacker

It isn't a problem with the browsers themselves, it's that you don't have Arabic fonts installed. Have a look at this thread for some help.

Well, to be accurate, I knew I didnt have the fonts installed, but I was counting on mozilla or firefox to at least have some sort of very BASIC font with it, but I guess they just dont pack a basic font with it. Well, it would be tiresome to pack fonts for all the unicode languages.

Thank you.

If you said the rendering was an issue... then I would be with you because Indic fonts aren't rendered properly with base Firefox renderer. But if you don't have the font... how can you expect Firefox to get it for you.

encoder that would increase the download size a lot, an since most users don't use that charactres it's useless.

Well, despite the fact that I got it to work, and I can finally read non-english pages. A questions is...Does firefox come with fonts if any? and if it does, why not pack indic fonts? Atleast very small ones, or as a different but parallel package?

Well, just a thought.

Because you'll end up with 100 apps, with each having their own 100 font directories, scattered allover your system.

http://xushi.co.uk/xushi/sv/pics/ff1.jpg
http://xushi.co.uk/xushi/sv/pics/ff2.jpg

Works like a charm, and out of the box. You just have to know what fonts to get and where to save them. As for encoding? I personally tend to stick to UTF-8