Re: Mad idea

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- abdulhaq <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk> wrote:
> I slept on it and you're right, Nadim. Because of the small size of the 
> open-source community interested in arabising things, there just isn't the 
> resources for something that would take years and would inevitably have a 
> lot of 'churn' in personnel. It would also be very difficult to persuade 
> other communities to change their code to suit. In my grand idea, we would 
> do that ourselves with patches, but.... well, I can still dream! I'm going 
> to put it on my mental back-burner for now.

I certainly didn't mean to squash any dreams - far from it.  All I was
saying is we should solve our immediate problems now and also work on
improving/enhancing the technologies of tomorrow to suite our needs, BUT
we need to make sure that any upcoming work is accepted apriori prior to
committing work/effort/time.  In other words, the idea should be studied
by the external community (and unicode) and be semi-approved so as not to
waste anyone's time.

> Thomas for instance notes that one of the features of properly written
> arabic is that the nuqaaT are added after all the base forms (i.e. without 
> dots) have been written first. This allows the dots to be placed in an
> attractive and unambiguous manner. This is a particularly big issue for 
> ligature-type characters, _which they all would be_ in the new scheme.

Sounds interesting but again unless the big boys are going to adopt this
(and that means deprecating what's out there now) this sounds very far
fetched (its the beta vs. VHS thing).  If microsoft and others don't
fully adopt this idea, for instance, aren't you left with a very small
subset of fonts that seemingly no one can use (due to implications on
the rendering engines that reside outside the font file) ?

> We are all used to printed arabic now and it looks (to us) neat, tidy and 
> nice. However, to a trained eye and someone who has spent a lot of time with 
> well written manuscripts, modern printed arabic is relatively ugly (I don't 
> include myself in that group but I'd like to be).

We all love beautiful printed Arabic and should all work for it.  Don't
let my pessimistic views (and bad adoption experience) stop you or anyone
else.  As noted, I'm now just looking to get what's out there working and
then start worrying about enhancements/corrections/de-crippled-ification :-)

For the record, if Thomas' ideas improve printed Arabic then I'm all
for them given they are taken in the current context and timeline.

Salam.

 - Nadim



	
		
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