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Re: arabeyes.org



Kaixo!

On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 03:57:54PM -0700, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> Greetings Pablo - sorry for using 2-email addresses to contact you (I didn't
> know which would be valid, sorry).

The fidonet.org has collapsed in fact :-(

> The reason I'm contacting you is two-fold,
> 
> 1. I'd like to invite you to our _new_ Open Source (GPL) effort in Arabizing
>    linux (adding Arabic read/write abilities to linux), please stop-by
>    and lend us a hand - we definitely need all the help we can get :-)

I'll take a look.

Note that input is quite easy and completly supported now.
It is "only" output that is hard, due to the double requriement of RTL
and glyph substitution.

>       http://www.arabeyes.org   (as in Arab'ize :-)

Funny, in my language "arabeyes" is a word that mean "arabic things",
"arabic stuff" (the suffix -eye has the meaning of relative to, in rapport
with)

> 2. On the most recent release of XFree86 - you'd created the following 
>    3 files,
> 
>       mulearabic-0.enc
>       mulearabic-1.enc
>       mulearabic-2.enc
> 
>    I'd wanted to get some info on why these files had been separated from
>    the others

I don't understand; separated from what?
Those are font encoding files so that the font server can take a unicode
encoded font (currently only TTF and Type1) and allow using it under
other X11 XFLD names. That is useful for X11 programs using X11 and not
yet Xft.

>    (is it due to emacs' MULE support ? so as to remove its
>    proprietary "dead" MULE encodings ??)

So, with the above three files it is possible to use a TTF font like
arial.ttf or tahoma.ttf etc and have the three X11 font names *-mulearabic-0,
*-mulearabic-1, milearabic-2; to use with MULE for example, but also
with any other arabic enabled program that can make use of mulearabic endoded
fonts (there aren't much, but it doesn't hurt providing that support)

>    And more importantly we've had a number of glyph questions on how to
>    encoding them (so as to remain Unicode compliant), but since Unicode
>    doesn't seem to bother itself with Arabic glyphs,

unicode is indepenent of glyphs, yes.

>    ISO-8859-6 is useless
>    and worthless (as has been noted on XFree86's own mailing-list).

No.
iso-8859-6 is just a text encoding (unicode too!) not a glyph encoding.
For arabic there is *always* the need to use a display rendering engine
that will convert one to many the text encoded chars to various possible
glyphs (and also revert the writting direction)

>    What are your thoughts and how should we proceed ?  Should glyph encodings
>    be stored to memory as part of the file

No, it must be avoided as much as possible.

>    Thoughts on a complete "standard" Arabic font package.

fonts are different of text encoding. It isn't very visible for latin or
cyrillic; but in case of Arabic that distinction is crucial.

> If you decide to answer some/all of these questions (or address those related
> to the thread(s) noted above) - please do so to 'general at arabeyes dot org' so as
> to let others partake.

Currently I'm quite busy with the preparation of Mandrake 8.1; but
I'll reply more in depth later.

> Thanking you in advance for your help.
> 
>  - Nadim
> 
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-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975