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Project list,



Salaam,
(someone tell me if this is noise, please just delete it)
I was just skimming the project list, and noted the following points:

- ISO-8859-6 is definitely not useless and is in fact a great standard,
except for the absence of three characters (p,v,g) that ought to be
there if we wanted to transcript popular litterature. The position of
glyphs is NOT the encoding, character encodings and glyphs are two
completely seperate things. A font file that maps glyphs to character
encodings in ISO-8859-6 is definitely useless (unless you like that
experimental Square Arabic I made;)) but shaping goes though an internal
process that maps character encoding to context dependent glyphs. You
can NOT store glyphs encodings in file, because this is unusable at
edition time internally, and kills portability of texts (since glyph
encodings are not portable, unless you store the defined unicode ones,
which is NOT the right approach: any common processing operation would
then consider the same letter in different glyphs as different letters).
So all you need to have is a font file that stores all possible glyphs
in positions you know, and you can use it for every possible encoding,
going from ISO to CP through Unicode and what you might invent. It is
STANDARD, not a hack.

- I saw that you still didn't have the position agnostic font that Akka
uses for consoles (Square Arabic;)) in BDF, I'll send you it as soon as
I go back to France.

- CP-1256 can be displayed used mappings without modification. Your
software would just have to process the characters through map functions
(there is no more standard way to do it). iconv, fribidi and loads of
other libraries do it. You can even do it yourself if you want, it's a
few tens of bytes wide array.

Salaam,
Chahine