Re: PuTTY : Patch to shape arabic letters correctly

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 11:17:01PM -0700, Kamal Dalal wrote:
> 
> Salamat,
> 
> My name is Kamal Dalal. I have joined arabeyes developers and would like
> to start contributing.

Welcome aboard ;)

> I am looking into patching PuTTY, and make it shape arabic letters
> correctly. From what I see (using a Win2k Pro), a simple command like "cat
> <utf-8 file>" displays all disconnected arabic letters. I heard from
> Mohammad Elzubair that he has seen PuTTY display correct shapes after the
> window refreshes itself. I could not see that behaviour. Can anybody on
> the list confirm or deny ?

It may have been under 'vim' which supports shaping. Hrmm, I guess
shaping is also missing under putty then.

> 
> I am also considering using Microsoft's uniscribe package. According to
> them , this package will do advanced unicode scripting including arabic
> shaping. If anyone has good / bad experience with uniscribe, I would be
> interested to hear about it.

I don't know what MS's uniscribe is, but it must be compliant with
PuTTY's MIT license (ie. licensing might be an issue here).

> If uniscribe turns out to be not feasable, the other alternative is to
> write the shaping algorithm, and figure out how to mix languages. Sounds
> like fribidi. Can someone point to a reusable piece of code that can
> translate a stream of utf-8 into glyphs ? Ok, if not reusable, I can
> compromise with a piece in any condition ;)

Are you talking about simple shaping? You may want to have a look
at a little Perl (eck!) script Nadim has recently put on CVS:

http://www.arabeyes.org/cvsweb/tools/shape_bidi/shape_arabic.pl

That might give you an idea. 

Good luck!
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
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