I was looking into this problem and found two different rendering
problems that are marked as one. 

First:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5660 
when switching from hebrew to english in mid line the first part of the
sentence (the hebrew) does not get rendered. The text is still there and
it is re-rendered correctly when you move to the next line. 

Second:
The family of:
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5629
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5619
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5080

5080 has the most discussion.

now , is this really a GnomePrint bug?
I was not able to reproduce this in any other gnome app.  

It seems to me that 
XAP_UnixGnomePrintGraphics::drawChars()
has nothing to do with the first bug because the chars are still
positioned right , its just that some of them are not rendered. 

what about Tomas Frydrych's solution to place chars with 
(UT_isOverstrikingChar(c) != UT_NOT_OVERSTRIKING) ?



On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 04:27, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > I'd like to ask whether abiword-2.0 will be useable for arabic and
> > hebrew (i.e. whether the bug's 5080 and 5619 will be fixed in the
> > 2.0 release).
> >
> > I'm just asking, because I need to know it now. Sorry, I cannot help
> > with those bug's, but I'm quite busy now :-(.
> >
> > Thank You very much!
> >
> 
> Hi Petr,
>         Unless Tomas Frydich gets some free time in the next week, or
> someone else understands how bidi is supposed to work (Nadav?) can
> help,  I can't see these bugs being fixed befor 2.0.
> 
> Sorry, sheer lack of resources on our part.
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> > Petr Tomasek
> >
> > --
> > Petr Tomasek, http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek/
> 
> 
> 
>