========
History
========

This program, BiCon, has a very entangled history.
That being said, here is a try on explaining it.

Prologue
--------

The program is the last in a series on programs to make the
console support bidirectionality. This has been needed in the
Arabic, Persian and Hebrew languages among others.

Acon
----
Written by Ahmed Abdel-Hamid Mohamed, this was the first program
that enjoyed relatively wide support, as it was distributed in
Mandrake.

Akka
----
The second effort has gone into improving the original acon code
and giving it vast additional abilities, this was the Akka
project, in Arabeyes. The Akka project is still there, if
somebody wants to look at it. Key contributors are Chahine
Hamila, Mohamed Elzubeir and Samy Al Bahra. It reached the
version 1.0 beta, but the code is becoming too complicated for
further enhancements.  Additional information is found in the
project site, at Arabeyes.

Farsi
-----
Taking place more or less parallel to the Akka development,
Behdad Esfahbod - widely known for his work on FriBidi - wrote
"farsi", as a tool doing the same job as Akka, more Persian
oriented.  He adopted the basic joining code from Roozbeh
Pournader, and borrowed some from script(1), mixed and matched
with FriBidi and Voila!  The code from script(1) proved to be the
major stopper for its distribution. More of the story can be
found in HISTORY.farsi, in this package.

At last: BiCon
--------------
The next step in Arabeyes was to base the code on the old farsi
code. After cleaning up the problematic-licensed code and
enhancing Arabic support besides Persian, _BiCon_ was there.

Here is the old ChangeLog:


2004-January  Behdad Esfahbod <bicon@behdad.org>
	* *: Well, code is handed to Arabeyes people.  Decided to
	change the name to "BiCon".  I'm not going to be the
	maintainer anymore (hopefully).  Already imported to
	Arabeyes CVS.  These nice people have removed the code
	borrowed from "script" and replaced with code from Python
	sources.  We are still to make changes to fit the new
	system.  Thanks guys.

==========================================================================

2002-06-13  Behdad Esfahbod <farsi@behdad.org>
	* */*.[ch]: Major changes.  Support many options now, among them is
	the option to output logical text, not visual.

2002-06-12  Behdad Esfahbod <farsi@behdad.org>
	* keymap/isiri2901.kmap.gz: Proposed key positions for bidi marks
	added.

2001-12-14  Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@bamdad.org>
	* farsi: Makes the shells current directory to be the same as when
	user runs the script.

2001-12-05  Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@bamdad.org>
	* fcon/fcon.c: Now accepts parameters to run instead of default /bin/sh.
	* bin/farsi: Pass parameteres to fcon.
	* bin/farsidict: A small script for dictionary lookup, using farsi.

2001-10-13  Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@bamdad.org>
	* */Makefile: Small changes.

2001-10-04  Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@bamdad.org>
	* fconsole/Makefile: Set target clean to remove fconsole-config too.

2001-9-22   Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@bamdad.org>
	* First released under farsidev mailing list.
