Arabeyes is interested in participating the in the 2007 edition of Google's Summer of Code. This event encourages students to get involved in open source coding projects by awarding successful participants with cash prizes. For more information read the FAQ page.

Students

If you have questions, or if you simply would like to discuss these projects, please subscribe to developer at arabeyes.org here: http://lists.arabeyes.org

Mentoring

(Mentoring application deadline: March 12)

The Arabeyes projects needs mentors for project ideas. Mentors have the task of assisting the applicants and to be the project contact points. They review and choose proposals and help participants in their process. Project maintainers are usually the best candidates for this task. The Advice for GSoC Mentors Page compiles advice for mentors. If you think your project needs assistance, do please apply as a mentor. ArabeyesTodo is an outdated but important "things to help with" list.

Selected ideas

Siraji Arabic OCR

• Info about Siraji: http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Siragi

Fonts

Improve and create new Arabic Free fonts

libarabic

A libarary providing vario functions for use with Arabic supporting application: examples include:

• normalisation: e.g محمد , مُحَمّد
• morphology library (spell checkers, translation...)
• ....

ITL ports

ports to most other languages written on top of the current ITL written in C. A lot of people need ITL ports to most other languages like PHP, Perl, Java, TCL, Python

• more about the ITL: http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=ITL

Website revamp

The website (arabeyes.org) needs to be ported to Drupal and integrated with other services including:

• New theme
• Proper bidi support
• Project management pages
• Proper RSS feeds
• Translation statistics (the current implementation is buggy and inaccurate), include ability to:
  • Download files
  • Assign files (or 'take them') through multiple phases, e.g

translation, QA1, QA2...

• Qamoose integration

Another option might be adding gettext and RTL support to the current CMS and (as well as fixing styles and BIDI).

The final product will serve as a proof of concept bilingual bidirectional website.

Mediawiki BIDI and internationalisation support

Currently mediawiki does not properly allow for two or more languauges on the same instance of the wiki, especially if they have different directions (e.g English and Arabic). This project aims to write mediawiki modules for that: auto BIDI and multilingual support. This will be of use to wikis like this one and the wiktionary sites (ar.wikipedia.org).

Cygwin

Add Arabic support to Cygwin.

Bug squashing

There is a collection of showstopper bugs related to Arabic support in Gnome, Abiword, VIM and Firefox, the bugs have been open for 4 years because they are fairly involved and need some dedication. This project is an attempt to tackle these bugs. They are shown here:

Bugs

Discussion

The Summer of Code thread resulted in many proposals: [1]

• Participating projects:
  • Siragi (Tarik Fdil) [2]

• Not participating projects:
  • Bayani [3]
  • Katoob [4]

• Proposals:
  • RTL in the Maemo platform [5]
  • libquran for embedded systems [6]
  • RTL in Irssi, zsh [7]
  • Ayaspell, Arabic spellchecking
  • Improving Arabeyes fonts [8]
  • Arabic-script printing [9]
  • BiCon [10]