About Arabeyes 

Arabeyes is a Meta project that is aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment. It is designed to be a central location to standardize the Arabization process. Arabeyes relies on voluntary contributions by computer professionals and enthusiasts all over the world.

Unlike other Arabized products, Arabeyes is Open Source, completely FREE and abides by the ideals of the open source communities. Arabeyes aims for all active participants and volunteers to partake in the development process and to speak their mind on this professional effort.

The idea of Arabizing Unix is not a new one. However, most of the attempts were done by Arab computer science students studying outside of the Arab world. Once those individuals graduated, their projects were abandoned. Resulting in very sparse code and in every subsequent attempt in having to re-invent the wheel. Arabeyes aims to eliminate this redundancy and lack of information by not depending on any one person or group - Arabeyes is aimed to succeed irrespective of the interest or availability of the parties involved.

Arabeyes plans to address every aspect of making the use of Arabic on linux/unix common and without headaches/hurdles. Arabeyes' goal is not to create new applications (if those applications exist), but to incorporate modifications/additions to existing common everyday-use applications. Arabeyes will initially engage in the following projects,

• Address the various font/keyboard-mapping issues
• Create the ability to write plain-text Arabic easily
• Create the ability to spell-check your Arabic text documents
• Create the ability to send/receive mail through an Arabic interface
• Localize (or translate) Common Graphical-User-Interface (GUI)
• Create the ability to take Arabic text files and create various enriched documents (TeX, word, etc)

Introductory Material