Re: Tanween variants and Unicode

[Gregg Reynolds <gar at arabink dot com>]

Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
> So, seems like my timezone is totally different from the rest ...

Hi,

Very busy these days, so no time till tomorrow to comment on some of 
these interesting issues, but one or two practical things...

>  have proofs for it. The other tool is fontlab. Try creating GSUB and
>  GPOS table with fontlab, and I think you will go crazy. Maybe Gregg 
> know better.

I think in principle it should be possible to write specs for these 
tables in a higher level language, so that they can be shared among font 
developers.  I found I was able to make some GSUB tables the way I 
wanted, but it turns out none of the OT engines out there supports the 
full logic of Open Type!  For example, I wrote contextual tables to 
select the proper glyph for tanween, so e.g. <damma><tanween> would do 
the right thing.  Worked just great inside of the Fontlab environment, 
but not in any of the editors I tried (notepad, word, some mac editors, 
etc.)  Fontlab tech support told me that only a few Adobe products 
support contextual substitution in GSUB.  :(

So it looks like we really need to write an OT Service provider to work 
with Freetype.  Anybody game?  I've started looking at the Freetype 
code; it's very clean and well-organized, and they have a bunch of OT 
stuff that they're migrating out of FT, since it is outside of the scope 
of FT.

> Another important thing about technology: Pocket PC 2003 does not
> have full opentype support. I'm not sure about palm, but I doubt it
> has. So, we can't display the text on those platform. I think these 
> platform is very important for displaying the Quran, since it is the 
> most convenient for all. ( I really would like to get one
> specifically for reading the Quran).

Don't forget cell phones.  I think it will be very common in future to 
have text stuff displayed on cell phones.  In the muslim world, there 
will no doubt be services that allow one to download a verse or a page 
or sura etc. to one's phone.

> On side note, I've just started to understand how Visual Truetype 
> works (sort of). My problem was I started with arabic font, but all
> of the documentation/samples/terminology are very tailored to latin
> font. Yesterday I decided to use Bitstream Vera font, remove the
> hint, and start hinting the font by going thru the document. I
> finally understand something!!  However, I'm still not sure how I can
> apply those concept / method to arabic font. I'm thinking of using
> bitstream font and merge it with my font to get a complete font. The
> license seems to permit such modification, but not sure  the
> implication of doing that.

Be sure to take a long look at the license.  I don't know what the legal 
status would be of mixing a GPL font with Vera.  Might be better to use 
the GPL fonts at http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/.  FYI, my plan (well, 
hope, anyway) is to add Arabic (and some other) glyphs to the monospaced 
Courier-class font in the collection and then hint it for on-screen 
viewing, so we will have a high-quality monospaced font for use in text 
editors.  Since all the characters now in the font have uniform stroke 
widths and very simple forms, I hope it won't be too difficult for a 
non-designer like me to come up with Arabic glyphs of compatible design. 
 We'll see.

-gregg