اردوویب بلاگ

AssalamOAlaikum,

I have spent some time updating the download links of the Urdu software in the older posts. These links have not been working since the time the Mehfil form moved to the vBulletin software and the its download manager was also moved to a new location.

السلام علیکم،

میں نے اس بلاگ کی پرانی پوسٹس میں سوفٹویر ڈاؤنلوڈ سے متعلقہ روابط کو اپڈیٹ کر دیا ہے۔ محفل فورم کے وی بلیٹن سوفٹویر پر منتقل ہونے اور نیا ڈاؤنلوڈ منیجر استعمال کرنے کے باعث پرانے روابط کام نہیں کر رہے تھے۔ محفل فورم کا نیا ڈاؤنلوڈ منیجر ذیل کے ربط پر موجود ہے:

اردو محفل فورم کا ڈاؤنلوڈ منیجر

ہمارے با صلاحیت دوست محمد علی مکی نے فائر فاکس کا بھی اردو ترجمہ کر ڈالا۔ وہ ماشاءاللہ اکیلے ہی پوری ٹیم پر بھاری ہیں۔ ذیل میں ان کی محفل فورم پر متعلقہ پوسٹ کا اقتباس موجود ہے:

تقریباً دو ماہ کی مسلسل کوششوں کے بعد بالآخر فائر فاکس کا اردو ترجمہ پیشِ خدمت ہے، فائر فاکس کے ترجمہ کا کام میں نے جنوری 2007 کے مہینے میں شروع کیا تھا اور سوچا تھا کہ اسے ہفتہ بھر میں جاری کردوں گا.. مگر یہ میری توقع سے کہیں زیادہ مشکل کام نکلا.. جیسے جیسے میں اس پر کام کرتا گیا مجھے اندازہ ہوتا گیا کہ یہ ایک آدمی کے بس کا کام نہیں تھا.. بلکہ یہ ایک ٹیم ورک تھا جسے میں نے اکیلے ہی گلے ڈال لیا اور یہ کمبل بن گیا.. اس کی وجہ فائر فاکس کا مکمل طور پر خود پر انحصار کرنا ہے.. یہ خدمتگار نظام کا کچھ بھی استعمال نہیں کرتا سوائے میموری اور ہارڈ ڈسک پر جگہ گھیرنے کے اور یہی اس کی مقبولیت کی وجہ ہے.. چنانچہ اس کا ترجمہ بھی اتنا ہی مشکل کام ہے، ایک ہی مینیو کی سٹرنگز بجائے ایک جگہ پر ہونے کے کئی کئی فائلوں میں پھلی ہوئی ہیں.. اوپر سے اسے اردو دکھانے کے قابل بنانے کے لئے انکوڈنگ بدلنا بھی ایک اچھا خاصا پیچیدہ مسئلہ رہا.. لیکن اللہ تعالی کا شکر ہے کہ یہ تمام مسائل نہ صرف حل کر لئے گئے.. بلکہ فائر فاکس کی سمت بھی تبدیل کردی گئی ہے... یعنی اسے دائیں سے بائیں کردیا گیا ہے..

مکمل پوسٹ کا ربط
فائر فاکس 2.0.0.2 اردو اپڈيٹر برائے ونڈوز

Our friend Muhammad Ali Makki has again done some tremendous work for the Urdu community. This time he has translated the interface of the Firefox web browser into Urdu. Read his post on the Mehfil forum about this. The Urdu update, which works at the moment only for Firefox version 2.0.0.2, cn be downloaded here.

السلام علیکم،

اردو ویب سرور یونیفارم سرور کا ترمیم شدہ پیکج ہے۔ اردو ویب سرور میں اس میں اپاچی ویب سرور، مائی ایس کیو ایل سرور اور پی ایچ پی کا وہ کمبینیشن موجود ہے جو کہ یونیکوڈ اردو اپلیکیشنز رن کرنے کے لیے موزوں ہے۔ اردو ویب سرور میں اپاچی ویب سرور اور پی ایچ پی کی یونیکوڈ ڈیٹا سے متعلقہ سیٹنگز بھی کر دی گئی ہیں۔ اس طرح طرح ونڈوز کمپیوٹر پر آسانی سے ایک ٹیسٹ انوائرنمنٹ مہیا ہو جاتا ہے جس میں اردو فورم، اردو جملہ اور دوسری اپلیکیشنز انسٹال کی جا سکتی ہیں۔ یوں آپ کو علیحدہ سے ویب سرور کے مختلف کمپوننٹس کے مناسب ورژن ڈاؤنلوڈ، انسٹال اور کنفگر کرنے کی مشکل سے نہیں گزرنا پڑے گا۔

آپ کی سہولت کے لیے اردو ویب سرور کٹیگری موڈ فورم اور آئی ایم پورٹل کے ساتھ پری انسٹالڈ ہے۔

مزید تفصیلات کے لیے ربط
اردو ویب سرور ڈاؤنلوڈ کریں

Urdu Web Server is a modified package of the Uniform Server and it contains all the web server components (apache, MySQL, php) appropriately pre-configured to run unicode Urdu web applications. Urdu web server, thus, provides a convenient way to setup an environment for installing and running applications such as the Urdu forum, Urdu Joomla etc. on windows computers. Urdu web server comes pre-installed with Urdu forum complete with the category hierarchy mod and the IM Portal mod.

Furhter details..
Download Urdu Web Server

والسلام

Update: The link has been updated again.

اگرچہ میں نے کافی عرصے سے اپنے لکھے ہوئے سوفٹویر اردو محفل فورم کے ڈاؤنلوڈ سیکشن میں ڈال دیے ہیں لیکن میں نے اس بلاگ کی پرانی پوسٹس میں ان کے ڈاؤنلوڈ روابط کو اپڈیٹ نہیں کیا تھا۔ اب بالآخر میں نے ان پوسٹس میں بھی نئے روابط ڈال دیے ہیں تاکہ تمام دوست کسی بھی سوفٹویر کی نئی ریلیز ہی ڈاؤنلوڈ کریں۔ ایک مرتبہ پھر ذیل میں اردو محفل فورم کے ڈاؤنلوڈ سیکشن کا ربط ہے جہاں سے آپ یہ سوفٹویر ڈاؤنلوڈ کر سکتے ہیں۔

اردو محفل فورم کا ڈاؤنلوڈ سیکشن

Though I have uploaded the software I have written on to the download section of the Urdu Mehfil Forum, I had not updated the download links in the posts in this blog. I have finally updated the download links in these posts so that you may always find the latest release of these software. Here, again, is the link to the download section of the Urdu Mehfil Forum.

Download Section of the Urdu Mehfil Forum

I released UrduEditor some time ago. Unfortunately it does not work on Windows 98. I did not realize at that time that right-to-left support needs to be installed in order for UrduEditor to work properly and this support is not available for Windows 98. Luckily I got a solution in my mind, which in fact is more of a hack, but it is still effective. Remember Urdu Webpad. It also works under Windows 98. Well, you need to have at least Internet Explorer 6 installed for it to work.

I then remembered that MFC also contains a CHTMLView class which is just a wrapper on Internet Explorer’s object model. It is capable of showing a html-page containing Urdu Webpad. This html-page loaded inside the application provides almost the same editing features as UrduEditor. Saving and loading Urdu text then requires accessing the contents of the Urdu Webpad control through the object model of Internet Explorer.

I call this application UrduEditor Lite since it provides a subset of the features available in UrduEditor. It is compiled using the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 98 systems (MSLU). This way the same application runs equally well both on Windows 98 as well as on Windows XP systems. The file unicows.dll needs to be in the application path in order for it to function properly in Windows 98. This program is useful for those who want to stick to their Windows 98 systems. Those Windows XP users who are too lazy to install support for Urdu language on their systems may also find it interesting.

Following are the UrduEditor features missing in UrduEditor Lite:

1. Customized Find and Replace dialog boxes
2. Urdu email client

Following is needed for the proper functioning of UrduEditor Lite:

1. Internet Explorer 6
2. Urdu Naskh Asiatype font
3. On Windows 98 the unicows.dll file in application’s path. This is included in the download.

UrduEditor Lite can still save Urdu text as html. The missing features are not really impossible to program. I had some problems in compiling the CPJNSMTPConnection-class with UrduEditor Lite on Windows 98 and therefore I left out the email client functionality. This class implements the SMTP-protocol. It may work after some minor modifications. I may think about incorporating it into UrduEditor Lite if there is enough demand.

Creating a wrapper around Urdu Webpad adds an interesting perspective to the further development of the UrduEditor Lite application. Now only the JavaScript or html-modules can be updated to augment the functionality of UrduEditor Lite. The html-page that gets loaded inside UrduEditor Lite is Editor.htm. You can freely customize it to your taste e.g. by adding a background image. I have also made use of the Urdu keyboard available with Urdu Webpad in Editor.htm. This on-screen keyboard keyboard can be expanded or collapsed by clicking on the button as shown in the following figure. You can make as many modifications to the Editor.htm file as long as you do not change the file name. Another requirement is that thid html-page should contain a textarea-element whose identifier attribute is “Editor”.

The Urdu Webpad included with UrduEditor Lite contains some updates from Asif. There are some minor bug fixes and now the buttons on-screen keyboard show tool tips. You only need to unpack the zip-file containing UrduEditor Lite application in a folder and it is ready for use. No extra steps need to be performed for its installation. I have tested UrduEditor Lite on Windows XP as well as on Windows 98. I do not have a separate installation of Windows 98. I ran Windows 98 inside a virtual machine. I used VMWare for this purpose.

I am releasing UrduEditor Lite again under GPL. Have fun!

Updated location:
Download UrduEditor Lite with source code

This post contains the following sections
Introduction
Using UrduEditor
Where is the on-screen keyboard?
Sending Urdu Emails
Posting to Yahoo and Google Groups
Development
Futher Development
Download
Feedback
References

Introduction
With this post I am presenting you the UrduEditor, a Notepad like application especially tailored for editing Urdu text. You can think of it as a souped-up Notepad, a stripped down Unipad or whatever. After developing the web-based Urdu editor (I will call it Urdu Webpad from now on) I thought of developing a native windows version of a similar utility which I call UrduEditor. Since then I have been working on this idea. The progress has been very slow since I have been extremely busy. I do not have time even to add and test the tiniest of features. There is still a lot of unfinished functionality. I have no choice but to release a version and declare it as beta. I am also providing the source code of the UrduEditor application under GPL. Everybody is encouraged to make changes and add features to the UrduEditor. I am also ready to change the license from GPL to some other license if somebody finds it too restrictive.

Using UrduEditor

The UrduEditor works in a way similar to that of Urdu Webpad. It is also capable of saving and loading Urdu text files. The Urdu text files are stored in UTF-8 format. Although the Urdu text files are plain text files, these are saved with a .uxt extension. This helps in identifying the Urdu text files in the windows file explorer and these also have shell association with the UrduEditor application i.e. double clicking on these files opens these in the UrduEditor application. The UrduEditor can even print, well, sort of. The problem is that the UrduEditor relies on the basic printing functionality of the MFC CEditView class. As a result the print-preview looks horrible and the printing is done left-aligned. I did not delve into the inner workings of the MFC/Windows printing mechanism. One solution would have been to use the CRichEditView class. That also would have meant a major re-write of the application. If there is anybody out there willing to augment the printing functionality of the UrduEditor application, they are most welcome to do it. One interesting feature of the UrduEditor is saving the Urdu text in html format. This html is of very primitive nature i.e. full of font tags and without any style. The reason why I chose this form of html was that I intended to use it for sending Urdu emails and this kind of html is most likely to be correctly displayed by any mail-client supporting html-mail.

At the moment UrduEditor uses the Urdu Naskh Asiatype font with a fixed point size. I will try to release a version soon that will allow selection of other Urdu fonts and point sizes. The keyboard mapping is similar to that of Urdu Webpad, which in turn mimics the keyboard mapping provided in the Inpage Urdu composing software.

I have also customized the Find and Replace dialogs to easily search and replace Urdu text. Figure 1 shows the main UrduEditor application window. Figure 2 illustrates the use of some toolbar buttons in UrduEditor.

Figure 1 : UrduEditor application

Figure 2 : UrduEditor’s Toolbar

Where is the on-screen keyboard?

This is probably the most glaring omission from the current release. I will try to provide an on-screen keyboard soon for aiding in entering Urdu text. Meanwhile the Windows 2000 and Windows XP users can use the on-screen keyboard provided with the standard windows installation.

Sending Urdu Emails

An editor sending emails? Well, why not? I had an idea about sending Urdu emails but was too lazy to develop an extra application for that. I found out that the most feasible way of sending Urdu text based emails is sending it as html-mail. There are arguments about the security concerns when receiving html-mail but I still think that it is indispensable.

I wanted to incorporate html-mail functionality without relying on the Microsoft Outlook’s object libraries. I looked around for a c++ class that could provide a thorough encapsulation of the SMTP-protocol. The best open source class that I found was CPJNSMTPConnection written by P.J. Naughter. In fact the send mail dialog is also stolen from the sample application provided with the above-mentioned class. Figure 3 shows the send mail dialog.

Figure 3 : Send mail dialog

Some configuration is necessary before actually sending mails. As shown in the figure, the mail server name and the port number has to be specified. The mail server can also be a POP-server. I have experimented connecting to an Exchange server and the POP-server provided by the webmail provider www.gmx.de. I have not been able to make it work with Gmail’s POP-server yet. There is an almost infinite number of combinations of the mail-clients and message formats and I have been able to test only a few. The configuration dialog is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 : Configuration dialog

I have successfully tested sending Urdu emails to Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts. Figures 5,6 & 7 respectively show the screenshots of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail with Urdu mail messages. This text is taken from some article at BBC’s Urdu website.

Figure 5 : Urdu message in Hotmail

Figure 6 : Urdu message in Gmail

Figure 7 : Urdu message in Yahoo Mail

It must be noted that you may or may not be able to freely choose the sender’s email address. For example I was able to specify any sender address I liked when sending email through an Exchange server but I was only able to send email through GMX after I specified my correct GMX-address. It is also interesting to note that when sending Urdu email this way to a Gmail-account, the email is likely to land into the spam-mail folder. Watch out for that!

Posting to Yahoo and Google Groups

One of my goals was to enable the members of Yahoo- and Google-groups to post in Urdu. This is possible by sending html-mails to the groups’ email addresses. The key to participating in a particular discussion is its title which must be specified as the subject of the sent mail. Following are the discussion groups that I set up for my experimentation:

Yahoo UrduProjects Group:
URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/urduprojects/
Post message: urduprojects@yahoogroups.com

Figure 8 : Urdu post in Yahoo Group

Google UrduProjects Group:
URL : http://groups-beta.google.com/group/urduprojects
Post message: urduprojects@googlegroups.com

Figure 9 : Urdu post in Google Group

It can be seen from the above images that the Urdu text is displayed better in the Google group. The text in Figures 8 & 9 was copied from a post in Danial’s blog.

Note: If you see garbage instead of Urdu text, change the default encoding of your browser to Unicode (UTF-8).

Development

I have developed the UrduEditor application using MFC and Visual C++ 6.0. I did not use Visual C++.NET because I wanted to avoid unnecessary dependencies that would prevent the program from running on Windows 98 systems. Asif has reported that the programs compiles fine with Visual C++.NET. I may gradually switch to Visual C++.NET for future development. The source code also presents an example of using Unicode with MFC. I have extended the MFC edit controls for editing of the Urdu text. I may at some later point create an MFC extension library useful for developing Urdu based applications.

Further development

A lot of work still remains to be done. I stay committed to the development of following features:

An on screen keyboard for helping in the entry of Urdu text.
Changing fonts and point sizes
More options for different html-templates
Dialog boxes for displaying and copying different types of html outputs
A toolbar for inserting diacritics

The ideas used in the development of the UrduEditor application can also be used in other directions. It is possible to develop a library of ActiveX controls to allow Visual Basic programmers to write Urdu based applications. The keyboard handling in the UrduEditor application can be made generic in order to support multiple keyboard layouts. This would make capable of editing text in local languages e.g. Sindhi, Balochi and Pashto. In fact I am already eying the keyboard layout format used in Unipad. I can accomplish this task only if I get enough support from people having interest in it.

Download

You can download the UrduEditor application and its source code from the following links.

Updated: Dowload UrduEditor with source code

Feedback

Your feedback is essential for the further development and improvement of the UrduEditor application. You can either post a comment on this blog or you can send a post to the above mentioned Yahoo or Google groups for your feedback.

References

1. CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree by Mark Wyner, http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssemail/
2. HTML Email and Using Style by Elizabeth Davies, http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=StyleInEmail
3. Adding Unicode support to an MFC-generated application in Visual C++ 6.0, http://www.differentpla.net/node/view/135

4. A helper class for reading, writing and appending to/from Unicode text files by PEK, http://www.codeproject.com/file/textfiledocument.asp

5. OfficeXP look and feel Owner drawn menu with the Office XP visual style by Jean-Michel LE FOL, http://www.codeproject.com/menu/menuxp2.asp
6. An MFC class to encapsulate the SMTP protocol http://www.naughter.com/smtp.html
7. Customizing the Common Find/Replace Dialog by Kalai Kandasamy, http://www.codeproject.com/richedit/customfind.asp
8. Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN), http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp