Re: [Fwd: Arabic patch: Todo list?]

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Steve Hall <digitect mindspring com> wrote:
> 
> Hello Arabeyes.org,
> 
> Another developer on the Vim list forwarded some comments regarding
> the patch for Arabic support. In case some of you aren't subscribed,
> I thought it would be useful to pass along.
> 

Thanks Steve.

> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Arabic patch: Todo list?
> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 02:57:10 +0100
> From: Antoine J. Mechelynck <antoine mechelynck belgacom net>
> 
> Hi Vimmers,
> 
> These last few days I have been trying out the Arabic support newly present
> in Vim 6.1 as distributed in binary (by Cream) for Windows.
> 
> My general impression is: (as everything concerning vim): Great!
> 
> Just a few remarks:
>      - The first day I had several crashes (protection violations, I think;
> CrashGuard intercepted them). Maybe I had been trying to use too big a font.
> Now I set 'gfn' height it to "only" 20, I save my work frequently, and the
> problem seems to have disappeared

Don't have any idea on what's happening here - could he narrow it down to
the failure and note the exact steps (I can't reproduce this).

>      - In vocalised text, some combining characters (e.g. sukuun IIRC) cause
> a break in the script (the consonant at that point assumes its "ending"
> presentation shape and the next one [if any] its "beginning" one). (This is
> a minor detail: the text is correctly generated in memory and on the disk,
> and it is still better than what NS7 does: last I tried, NS7 placed the
> diacritics between constonants instead of over them, producing a very ugly
> "chopped" script.) Also (and this is common with NS7, IE6 and WordPad) there
> must be no combining characters on the laam of a laam-alif ligature, or it
> won't be displayued right. (Temporary solution: omit them; or maybe in the
> case of long "a" place the fat'ha on the alif of prolongation instead of on
> the laam. The result displays more or less aceeptably but is not the
> "received" way to do it AFAIK.)

I'm not sure I get the point - but if I read it correctly the user is noting
that using harakat (sukuun, fatha, etc) on combined characters doesn't show
properly ?  If so, then that's ok since the combined characters (Lam+Alef)
usually aren't supposed to be followed by harakat characters.

>      - The Hebrew, Farsi and Unicode helpfiles are useful; however, IMHO it
> would be nice to have a helpfile addressing the peculiarities of Arabic
> editing. If nothing is forthcoming, I might even write a first draft myself;
> however my experience is limited (hark, hark! help welcome): I have been
> using it as yet only in Unicode and only under Windows. And I don't know the
> language yet, only the alphabet, but I am learning (alas, I don't anymore
> learn languages as easily as when I was a young boy). Off the top of my
> head, I think of at least the following topics for such a helpfile:

Yeah, I'm planning on adding the necessary docs and helpfile.

>          * Mixing LTR (Latin text, Arabic numbers, etc.) and RTL (arabic
> words and sentences) in a single file (be it for text and digits, for
> bilingual text, for RTL Arabic text embedded in LTR HTML tags, etc.)

You really need Bidi support within Vim for this to work properly.  Last
I talked to Bram about this, he had no intentions of even considering the
thought since it would mean major upheaval to how things are handled.  I
would, on the other hand suggest the following - start vim within a Bidi
capable terminal emulator (like mlterm).
 
> Note: I haven't yet tried to make Vim understand M$'s "Arabic" option of the
> Intrenational keyboard (my usual keyboard is fr_BE).

We're only opting to support UTF-8 arabic support and are advocating nothing
else (esp. not a proprietary encoding).

Regards,

 - Nadim


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