RTL in markup/docbook/??

[elzubeir@arabeyes.org (Mohammed Elzubeir)]

Salam,

I am trying (helplessly) to figure out how to use DocBook/XML to produce
Arabic documentation. This is probably not the first time I approach
this issue, but I am going at it again.

At Arabeyes [1], we use DocBook/XML for all our documentation.
Unfortunately, for the Arabic documents we have two problems:

1. The HTML output is in LTR mode (should be in RTL)
2. None of the XSL-Fo's I know of (we use Apache's FOP [2]) can handle
   Arabic text (not the UTF-8 nor the bidi mode).

Currently, what we have been doing is adding a CSS that sets the
direction to rtl. This is not a good enough solution, since browsers are
instructed that they can happily ignore those in CSS [3]. It is noted
that this should be in the mark-up. 

So, where in all of this do we go from here? I am completely lost!

References:
[1] http://www.arabeyes.org/
[2] http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/#IDAMJFO

Regards
-- 
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://elzubeir.fakkir.net/ |
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