Re: Proposal for the Basis ofaCodepointExtensiontoUnicodeforthe Encoding of theQuranicManuscripts

[Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>]

Just open up my mail, and good to see a good discussion going on..

First, I'm not saying Opentype support under linux is better than
windows. As far as arabic support in windows, atm I think uniscribe
does provide a slightly better support than Pango (the equivalent of
uniscribe). I'm not sure it is true or not, but I think Pango has a
bug dealing with ligature and marking. I've submited a bug report to
them, and Mr Behdad Esfahood (not sure the spelling, sorry if it is
mispelled), who I think also subscribe to arabeyes mailing list is
looking into this matter. But of course, uniscribe has it's own bug
and limitation.. What I'm saying is the font rasterizer , freetype
does render the glyph better than windows (as least for my font).
Freetype does not deal with opentype, it just render the glyph it's
asked to do. You can see the difference at the website. The freetype
autohinting does not use truetype hinting information at all.
Basically what it does is simply "smart guessing" of what the font
should look like at small resolution, instead of relying on the font
hints.

Before suggesting anything, let me state the reason why I encode th
quran the way I did it. Last year, when Mr Yousif was around, I did
get into a discussion with him regarding this matter. His goal with
this project was to enable the quran to be rendered in as many medium
as possible, including console application. I mention to him that at
the current state of technology support, that is not quite possible.
That is why he insist on submitting the proposal to unicode, so that's
why I did ask what happen since then. Anyway, my view was we can get
the quran rendered properly using the most widely technogy use today,
that is Windows (2K family), and linux. Just do what ever necessary to
get it to work, and at the same time a proposal can be submitted to
unicode to fix the problem. I think I can help a bit about the
proposal, but not much since I'm not a language expert, so I would
like to leave it to others. But seems that not much progress yet.

Ok, now for my suggestion. Seems that we have a few opinion. So, I
would suggest anyone who really would like to get this going, to
create a complete document , basically recomendation on how the quran
should be encoded. Then, I can encode the quran the mention in that
specification (I think this process wont take long. Maybe 1/2 to 1
hour of my time, assuming the there is mistake in the current file)
Seriously, this won't take much of my time , since most of the
encoding process is automated . Then, we can work on testing the file
against the targeted technologies, such as windows, linux, console,
pda etc. After this have been tested, maybe then we can have a
consensus agreement among us, on which method is the way to go, or it
might be a combination of the specification, who knows.

Regards.

PS:
Mete, 
You asked about fontlab. In my own currency, USD 599 is a lot
(conversion 3.8, ~  $2000), so that's why i say it is out of my reach.
If I can get return from it, it might be worth it, but I don't see
how. However, at the moment if you can get a copy of Visual Truetype
for me that would be great. It is actually given free, but you have to
register with Microsoft.

On 6/22/05, Thomas Milo <t dot milo at chello dot nl> wrote:
> >> Yes OpenType is supported in Linux environments so any user can have
> >> OpenType technology for free. Actually Meor is saying that his
> >> OpenType font works better in Linux than Windows!
> 
> Well, the explanation is possibly the underperformance of Uniscribe.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> t
> 
> 
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