Hi there guys, My name is Yaron Shahrabani and I'm an active translator of Wine to Hebrew. As probably some of you may know Hebrew is written from right-to-left meaning that the GUI and text rendering should work in a reversed/mirror order as opposed to Latin text.
Due to some recent work doen by Alexander (Thanks! AJ, great work!), Hebrew is better supported now by wine GUI mechanism but as a translator I ran into some dillemas about the translation of strings that appear in console window, well apparently this is a tough question.
Paul (Vriens) sent me 2 screenshots the other day that showed the way Hebrew is handled by the different command line platforms: The first one is the VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator) which most of us know as gnome-vte or gnome-terminal, this app emulates a command line interface for X11. As opposed to Konsole (The same app only for KDE) gnome's vte cannot handle Hebrew correctly (is there any need to attach bugs or you'll just believe me?).
gnome-terminal can show the Hebrew glyphs but they all appear in reversed order, same thing happens for wine apps that present a command line output (such as reg, ipconfig, etc.) when running via gnome-terminal.
The other option to display and work with a CLI app is via wineconsole, since wineconsole does not support Hebrew our of the box we have to install the msttcorefonts package in order to do so.
At the second screenshot that Paul sent me with the wineconsole screenshot of reg (I translated the app but since I'm not sure how it will work I haven't submitted it to wine-patches yet but I will send it here if needed) Ive seen some blanks with ":" at the end meaning that the glyphs were missing, few minutes later Paul sent me an updated screenshot after installing the missing glyphs, the Hebrew looked absolutely perfect, the only problem was that the semicolon still appeared to the right of the text instead of to the left (where the sentence ends in Hebrew).
So my dillema is as follows: Should we continue helping improving the support of displaying RTL languages in wineconsole or should we just ignore the CLI strings like MS did with all of their OSes (Since Windows XP Hebrew is no longer supported officially, meaning that you have to apply 3rd party patches in order to make Hebrew text appear in cmd), Hebrew in command line is only used by some old healthcare services and lots of old games and ancient word processors and database apps (some of them died after Windows dominated the market).
Another vital question I want to to this message is to ask our fellow Arabic and Persian speakers what do they have to say about this issue and if their propriatery operating systems has the same issues...
I would love to clarify any misclarifications. Thank you all, Kind regards, Yaron Shahrabani
<Hebrew translator>