Bug 101182

Point (2) was introduced upon a suggestion from RedHat engineer ( I don't recall 
the name now). 
When we first introduced KACST fonts, they had problems with the english glyphs 
(license), so that it was suggested to remove all english glyphs, and we were told 
that it will fix the problem !!! 

And I would like to refer to this bug too 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=101228 
 

I thnk it's right that the Arabic fonts don't have English glyphs.

The problem is just that fontconfig's selection algorithm is poor
in this area. I have some plans to work around that it in future
versions of Pango, but for now, getting Arabic to work properly
in an en locale is hard.

*** Bug 102601 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

How about keymaps, and proper switching to Arabic and English layout for Text
input ? 

Owen .. Arabic supports looks good on Fedora B3 
Quick note though, when chosing arabic-egypt as 
the lang from the GUI login, it works fine though
the Main Menu (The Red Hat on the status bar) and
all the menus are on the left, which should be
on the right. 

redhat-config-keyboard does not have arabic

Checked the other bugs and it seems that RTL issue for the menues has been
solved before yet it is not included in Fedora Test 3 .. Also some of the menues
for GNOME is not updated for Arabic translation, although from gnome's i18n site
the arabic translation is 100% done. Can we update that ?

Sherif - can you test FC3 test 2 for arabic and file separate bugs
about keyboard, menu, etc, issues? Using this bug for all arabic
related issues doesn't work out very well.

In fontconfig-2.2.3-2, I've added KacstQura to the sans,
sans-serif, and monospace aliases, which should provide decent
out-of-the-box rendering of Arabic.
(this package won't make test 2, you probably should upgrade to it
manually before testing)

It might make more sense to use KacstBook rather than than KacstQura
for the Serif alias, but I'm not very happy with its rendering
at small sizes. KacstQura doesn't render that well either - 
it is too dark. But it seems better to me.

Owen .. I will test it out and provide the feedback. Thanks 

Owen - I have tested , FC3 20040904 from rawhide. I installed it and
here is my comments (P.S. I was using VMWare due to lack of machine
available to test on):

* Anaconda - I was unable to see the GUI install, I guess VMWare issue.

   If I select Arabic installation on TEXT install , words still show
   LTR and letters are not connected, lack of keyboard maps I belive.

* X - I agree with you on the font selection, it looks fine and decent
rendering. I sent a note to the maintainer of the fonts to check your
note about the fonts to see if we can fix it.

* When trying to add Arabic mapping to the keyboard layout I got the
application crashes, and X next time restarts give me error of:

  Error activating XKB configuration.
  Probably internal X server problem.

  X server version data:
  The XFree86 Project, Inc
  3320

  If you report this situation as a bug, please include:
  - The result of xprop -root | grep XKB
  - The result of gconftool-2 -R     
/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/xkb


I still did not go through all the know bugs to see if it has been all
fixed , but this is my first impression so far. 

OK, I don't want this to be a generic "problems with Arabic" bug.
It sounds like the font situation is OK.