Re: fribidi & arabic shaping

[Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi at arabeyes dot org>]

Salam ..
  If I may throw some thoughts and words .. It seems that Pongo got the 
solution .. and Nadim wants to have another alternative solution .. I may be 
un aware of Pongo and its implementation .. but could it be used in a non-GUI 
application .. like could we implement pongo with mutt ? or with Emacs ?

Another thing .. About Pongo geating dead .. well the Gnome people won't 
depend on a dead project for thier GTK ! so as long as Gnome is depending in 
Pongo it seems to be very dependable .. I just checked the pongo.org page and 
it was Last modified in 08-Mar-2002, which and got Pongo 1.0 released. so the 
dead has got awake..
 

About BIDI .. I didn't see Pongo in action to say the truth .. but sure I did 
NOT like QT3 bidi implementation .. specialy the fact that RTL and LTR is 
automaticly set (an unwanted feature) depending on the first character in the 
line .. I noticed that when dealing with Kbabel in KDE 3 where lines that 
start with a latin letter can not be viewd RTL ( althogh it has proper BIDI 
and can be readable) ..

Now The options you are discussing are:
1- add shaping to fribidi
2- use pongo
3- make a fribidi-dependant shaping library

it seems that fribidi is starting to be the standard for bidi in general .. 
and pongo is getting more spotlight as GTK depend on it.. and getting our own 
shaping library implemented in EVERY software is almost imposible ..

I think that getting shaping to fribidi although bringing benefits, it will 
get fribidi out of what it initialy was for.. and I do not think that the 
fribidi people will approve that.. imagine integrating VIM to be a word 
processor instead of a text editor :-)

I think that is Pongo got all what we need then pongo would be the solution.. 
as it is intended to address issues such as shaping .. we should contact the 
pongo maintainer and see if there is any known issues for Arabic shaping, or 
TODO items related to arabic shaping, and get our hands on it ..

-- 
Yours,
Isam Bayazidi
Amman - Jordan
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