Re: fribidi & arabic shaping

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 20:27:38 +0100
  "Chahine M. Hamila" <mch at chaham dot com> wrote:
> 
> Nadim, as per your request, I'm removing the mail from developer and dealing 
> with it from core. If you want it to be only between us two just say it:) I 
> understand what you are saying. The point is, Pango already does what you
> exactly say.  IOW, it adds a shaping layer (among others) to fribidi.
> So maybe I'm missing something here, but my impression is exactly that, that
> you're asking to redo Pango (or rename pango into fribidi). Supposing the
> fribidi people would want for example to do that, they would just kinda have
> to do this: cp pango fribidi...

I appreciate you taking this off-line, its best if we have a common stance
regarding issues.  As for what I'm getting at -- I agree with you 100% that
pango could and will do the job.  The point is that not many people out there
are willing to look at pango (or any other thing) and it would REALLY REALLY
REALLY be nice to have arabic shaping in fribidi (since its being adopted in
various places with semi-ease) and for us to get shaping for FREE (yup, free)
would be ideal.  Case in point, window managers -- if you convince the
authors to include Bidi (fribidi) then all arabic will work perfectly without
us lifting a finger and having to deal with that author (mind you lots of
.il people are pushing fribidi all over the place and its no surprise that
they might not like it there since it amounts to making life easier for us,
but that could be the paranoia talking, don't know).

I understand all the technical details and agree with them and YUP they are
like water and oil, etc; but again, if we can pull this off (and I still hope
we can), it would automatically give us shaping abilities without us having
to do anything.  It will be said that if an application has Bidi (most likely
Fribidi -- since again most out there dislike IBM's solution) we'll have
shaping with it.  I think this would be a GREAT acoomplishment and would
open the door to seeing lots more arabic out there.

Again, thanks for taking this off-line.

 - Nadim


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