Re: Quranic Proposal - Dynamic glyph substitution with OpenType

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

Hi Nadim,

You are coming through loud an clear.

> Thomas (not sure if my questions are reaching you, but here goes another
> one), how long do you expect such technologies making its way to the
> end-user from the likes of microsoft and/or adobe (and I'm not talking
> about hacking/creating something on our own either) ?

OT technology has already a solid bridgehead on the MS windows platforms NT5
and later; Adobe InDesign also renders OT on MacOSX; MacOSX itself is
steadily increasing its Arabic support. I am copying this messge to the
Apple Font department to get their time estimate for full OT and or ATSUI
support for Arabic.

> Finally, why is this "font technology" only specific to Arabic - why
aren't
> such things being proposed and/or discussed and pursued (and maybe they
> are) for umlaut-type characters in German/Swedish/etc (out of curiosity) ?

It is not at all specific for Arabic. You guessed it right, OT is already
very useful for the characteristic diarrhoea of Latin alphabets :-) (ACE was
developed specifically for Arabic, though)

regards,

t