I'm very sorry, but to the best of my knowledge, Tk is not really capable of displaying Arabic strings coherently. (Oh I wish it could -- my life would be so much easier! But alas...)

The things Arabic needs that Tk doesn't provide are:

• Bidirectionality ("bidi" text). Actually, I don't know of any GUI library or display tool (including the latest/greatest browsers) that does a proper job of handling bidirectional text, because in general, there is no "right way" to do this (that is, no bidi algorithm exists that can do the right thing in all cases). But the popular browsers, and Qt and I think Gtk, can do the right thing most of the time. Tk simply has no ability whatsoever in this regard.

• Context-sensitive character shapes and ligatures. The "primary" unicode page for Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF) defines only the "canonical" letters and marks, without being concerned about their various "initial/medial/final" variations in shape -- and virtually all Arabic text data you will ever encounter is written using the characters in this range. There's a whole separate section of unicode for the "contextualized" versions of the letters and marks, and a whole pile of display logic for converting "canonical" strings into strings of these variants, in order to assemble a display that makes sense to competent readers of Arabic. Again, Qt and Gtk have this covered, but so far as I know, none of this logic has been ported to Tk. (I would love it if someone showed me I was wrong about this).

There's an appreciable set of applications that can work fairly well without worrying about bidi text -- they just happen to never mix Arabic words with Latin-based words or digit strings on the same line in a display, and they generally don't encounter things like bracketing characters (parens, etc). But without a working method for context-sensitive character rendering you've got a non-starter.

So, either get up to speed on Qt or Gtk, or else configure your app to use HTML and browsers as the GUI. (update: or, knuckle down and build the parts for Tk that are missing...)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.