Questions about Arabic

Hello Raja,

I was hoping that someone who knew more about this than I do would answer but 
since that hasn't happened ...

You wrote:
>I am working on a project which deals with the PF on AS400 having both
>arabic as well as english data.

>I need some information on

If you intend to do much with different character sets you will need to 
invest in a copy of the Character Data Representation Architecture Reference 
and Registry (SC09-2190) which is a hardcopy book and two CD-ROMs containing 
the CDRA Library.

>how to set my keyboard to key in arabic data.

Using OS/2 Warp 4 I can simply open the Keyboard object and select Arabic as 
my keyboard type from a list of 55 different keyboard maps.  I presume that a 
supposedly modern OS like Windows can do the same.  However, when I checked a 
W95 installation (Start->Settings->ControlPanel) and opened the Keyboard icon 
and selected the language tab it only listed two variants of English.  There 
is a button to add additional keyboard mapppings but Arabic isn't listed.  
Either W95 doesn't support Arabic or you need a special version of W95 that 
does support it.  I presume the same is true of the other dialects of windoze 
(98 CE ME NT 2K).

OS/400 supports different keyboard types on the device description.  There is 
a KBDTYPE parameter on the CRTDEVDSP command which you should set to CLB for 
Arabic.  I think you will need to have an Arabic keyboard attached to the 
device so the key mappings are correct.

I believe Arabic is an SBCS character set so you can run that on a 'normal' 
system using standard devices or emulation products.  You probably should 
install the Arabic Secondary Language (2954).  If Arabic is DBCS, which I 
doubt, then you will need to install a DBCS version of OS/400.

Your PC may also need special fonts installed in order to display the Arabic 
characters correctly.  However, if you find a version of windoze that 
supports the Arabic keyboard then I'd expect it to display Arabic characters 
correctly.

>how to create a physical file which should contain some fields in arabic
>and some fields in english.

Creating a PF to hold both kinds of data is trivial.  Simply tag the Arabic 
fields with an Arabic CCSID (e.g., 420) and the English fields with an 
English CCSID (e.g., 37).  Use the DDS keyword CCSID.

>how to transfer arabic data from pc to as400 and viceversa.

The AS/400 FTP client and server use CCSID support to convert between SBCS 
character sets.  You can control the server ASCII CCSID using CHGFTPA and the 
client (i.e., the AS/400 client) by specifying the required CCSID on the FTP 
command.  Since FTP has no concept of fields I don't know if it will 
correctly handle a record in which some fields are in one CCSID and some 
fields are in another CCSID.

You can use SQL over DRDA to transfer the data and it will correctly handle 
the different CCSIDs.

You can probably use the file transfer mechanisms provided in Client Access 
also.  I'd expect them to correctly handle the CCSIDs but I haven't suffered 
windoze in such a long time I know longer know much about Client Access.

Regardless, some experimentation is in order because the CDRA manual lists 
the following Arabic CCSIDs:

        00420   Arabic (all presentation shapes)
        00864   PC Data: Arabic
        01008   Arabic 8-bit ISO/ASCII
        01046   Arabic - Windows
        01089   ISO 8859-6: Arabic
        01256   MS Windows, Arabic
        04516   Arabic (base shapes and Lamaleph ligatures)
        04960   PC Data: Arabic (all shapes)
        05142   Arabic - Windows (base shapes only)
        08612   Arabic (base shapes only)
        09056   PC Data: Arabic PC Storage/Interchange
        13152   PC Data: Arabic Bilingual (base shapes)
        25440   PC Display: Arabic - Output Imaging
        29536   PC Display: Arabic
        33632   PC Display: Arabic (all shapes)
        37728   PC Display: Arabic Bilingual (data store subset)
        41824   PC Display: Arabic Bilingual (base shapes only)

As you can see, you have some research ahead of you.  Have fun!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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