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Arabtex with Emacs works quite nicely for what I need (Arabic quotes in European-language papers). Otherwise you could, you know, look at the information the arabeyes project put together on the subject (basically arabtex + lyx

almost all of KDE and Gnome now support arabic, OpenOffice too.

however the best software for writing text remains the text editor, and the best Arabic text editor is still katoob.

if you need any help with your arabic or want to practice it feel free to join us at http: //linux-egypt.org and #linux-egypt@irc.freenode.org

as for the police, I have this theory that they're all trained in the same place :-)

75% of the content in these articles were comparison and contrast between Saudi culture and the author's American culture; 25% of it consisted of actual information about technology in Saudi Arabia.

As a Muslim, if I were to write an article about Linux adaptation in say -- France, do you think I'm going to use 50% of the text to explain women there do not cover their heads, many drink alcohol and eat pork, and none of them pray five times daily? No, because I'm not looking to create a cultural competition; I simply don't care since, although I may have certain cultural beliefs and even prejudices, it's irrelevant to the actual topic.

Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam's two holiest places; it is the home of Islam itself. Coupled with that is Arabian culture that is much more rich than that of Arabized nations in the North (such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon etc.) Part of 'freedom' is realizing that people may hold values that are in stark opposition to your own; ones that may even seem 'incorrect,' however NOT being a member of that culture you have no room to judge that. The fact is that the vast majority of Saudis approve of their government, and this is coming from someone who has spent most of my adult years amongst Saudis, and plan to spend the rest of my life there.

The author did not really write a journalistic piece, and that's probably not surprising since he is a self-proclaimed geek. The following links should fill the voids these articles left out. There are some very impressive open source projects going on in Saudi Arabia, including the first Arabic Linux Live-CD (based on Knoppix I believe, as well as many other projects, including Arabic localizations of Mozilla. Feel free to visit the Saudi Linux User group while you're at it. For Arabic Mac users like myself, they may find this site informative.

75% of the content in these articles were comparison and contrast between Saudi culture and the author's American culture; 25% of it consisted of actual information about technology in Saudi Arabia.

As a Muslim, if I were to write an article about Linux adaptation in say -- France, do you think I'm going to use 50% of the text to explain women there do not cover their heads, many drink alcohol and eat pork, and none of them pray five times daily? No, because I'm not looking to create a cultural competition; I simply don't care since, although I may have certain cultural beliefs and even prejudices, it's irrelevant to the actual topic.

Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam's two holiest places; it is the home of Islam itself. Coupled with that is Arabian culture that is much more rich than that of Arabized nations in the North (such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon etc.) Part of 'freedom' is realizing that people may hold values that are in stark opposition to your own; ones that may even seem 'incorrect,' however NOT being a member of that culture you have no room to judge that. The fact is that the vast majority of Saudis approve of their government, and this is coming from someone who has spent most of my adult years amongst Saudis, and plan to spend the rest of my life there.

The author did not really write a journalistic piece, and that's probably not surprising since he is a self-proclaimed geek. The following links should fill the voids these articles left out. There are some very impressive open source projects going on in Saudi Arabia, including the first Arabic Linux Live-CD (based on Knoppix I believe, as well as many other projects, including Arabic localizations of Mozilla. Feel free to visit the Saudi Linux User group while you're at it. For Arabic Mac users like myself, they may find this site informative.

The way it works in open source projects is similar but with a twist. If there are enough people who want to have a certain application in their language they will have to get together and start working on the translation. The way this works for most applications is through using the gettext library to produce POT files. That is, all output strings are extracted into a file which the translator can then work on. This way, the translators don't have to interact with the source code.

To make things even better, tools that can manipulate those files have been developed, such as KBabel and gTranslator. Even Emacs has a PO mode.

An example of this is the Arabeyes Project, which is the official translation team for both Gnome and KDE interfaces.

Arabeyes.org was presenting at this as well. What a worth while project it is.