PuTTY Bidi - final points

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Simon, we'd really like a bit of your attention as we are very close
to completing the tasks and addition to PuTTY that we promised, yet
a few nagging areas remain.  I will note them below and it might be
best to get on IRC to really hash things out.

 1. Shaping code and its insertion point have been modified per your
    last comments - please review the patch and comment.

    http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/projects/external/putty/arabic_putty.patch

 2. We have 2 display issues which are a mystery,

    a. There are instances in which 2 glyphs need to be combined and
       shown as one.  Namely LAM (0x0644) and ALEF (0x0627) get combined
       and replaced by LAA (0xFEFB) along with various permutations.

       In other words, assume LAM is L and ALEF is A and LAA is K
       you would expect to visually see this,

         LAxyz LAmnopq

       changed to,

         Kxyz Kmnopq

       Again, the two glyphs need to be combined to constitute a single
       character - we term this 'combining'.  What is happening now is
       that a space shows up that we can't seem to remove (due to line
       length, etc), so we end up with,

         K xyz K mnopq

    b. There are various instances where composing characters need to be
       shown (composing characters are not specific to Arabic either).
       These are glyphs that piggy-back on the proceeding character such
       as (0x064B or 0x064E, etc).  PuTTY currently seems to simply
       pass them over - ie. they don't show up.

       http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf

 3. Bidi.  Ahmad has already tested things with Bidi on some sample code
    that Unicode offers (its license won't allow us to use it either),
    but lacking a clear decision on which code to use (wasn't someone
    looking at ICU and its license - Owen ?) we are in limbo in terms
    of what to use.  It is critical that this gets settled and agreed
    upon ASAP !!

 4. There are various minor issues which will need to be addressed later,
    a. Cursor positioning
    b. Character deletion
    c. Which options to let the user toggle (where to place buttons)
       etc.

BTW: all the various questions/comments are in the README we're upkeeping.

  http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/projects/external/putty/README

We anxiously await for your input and advice (and possibly IRC time).

PS: please reply to all those included (ie. make sure to CC 'developer').

Regards,

 - Nadim


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