Re: Fribidi and joining

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 02:32:18 +0430 (IRST),
  "Behdad Esfahbod" <behdad bamdad org> wrote:
> 
> To be honest, the problem is that fribidi's pride is that it's
> "light, simple & still conformant".  So nor me, niether anyone
> else is going to sacrifice these to get arabic shaping in.
> 
> So until arabic joining/shaping (whatever you call prefer) gets
> standard, fribidi's CVS will not let any arabic specific code in.

Uh oh :-)  In brief, if all the new code was added as optional code
(ie. ifdef'ed out) with the user opting for its inclusion or not
should be something that would fall right-in as far as fribidi
being "light, simple & conformant" (esp. for those not choosing to
include arabic shaping).  The problem, as was stated before, is if
you think the inclusion of an Arabic-centric library is something
that is easy to do you might be kidding yourself.  The likelihood
of including bidi support (due to its benefits to not only Arabic,
but Persian, hebrew, etc) is much higher than segmenting all those
things into separate bits and pieces.  In other words, an application
is much more likely to go through the headache (if any) to support
4-5 languages and not just one.  As noted, I've said all this before
so I don't want to sound like a broken record - squeek squeek.

> The solution, as I can see is to have a real simple,
> piece-of-code/library implementing the arabic part, and ask
> people to use it (I've got the link to import it in AbiWord, for
> example).  The code itself, Roozbeh and I have one implementation
> which I sent to Moe a few days ago.  It needs some cleanup and
> interface design before going into Arabeyes/FarsiWeb CVSs.

I might be missing something here -- you are suggesting having a
piece of code that does shaping/joining only, right ?  Post-bidi
or Pre-Bidi (warning: this is a loaded question :-) ?  And that
would work without the noted problem ?  Or are you simply saying
you don't want to see Arabic-centric issues involved in fribidi ?

In any regard, I still highly suggest including any fragment within
fribidi (given that fribidi's main functionality is unaffected) with
it being sectioned off (ifdef 0 - if you will, simply to show intent
and for this topic not to rear its ugly head again).

Behdad, what are your thoughts on how to go about getting this
"arabic shaping get [more] standard" ?

In passing, I don't see how the fribidi API is really that affected.
In other words, can't you go ahead with your current plans for the
API (sans Arabic) and then add-in Arabic (and possible a new call or
two to the API ?).  That would most certainly be backwards compatible
and ought to not affect anyone using whatever API was already in use.

PS: although we keep using and saying Arabic, all these issues affect
    Persian, correct ?  Sorry for the bias :-)

On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 02:36:39 +0430 (IRST),
  "Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh sharif edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Aug 2002, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 
> > To be honest, the problem is that fribidi's pride is that it's
> > "light, simple & still conformant".  So nor me, niether anyone
> > else is going to sacrifice these to get arabic shaping in.
> 
> Well, I was shocked when I saw this. Asked Behdad and he told me that here
> the emphasis is on *conformant*, and not light. So we'll hopefully get
> some shaping in FriBidi after we reach a clear consensus with Unicode bidi
> experts.

heheheheh - this was pretty funny; but I do like what I hear about its
ultimate inclusion :-)  You can thus disregard the various questions
above except for the "how to go about getting a more standard shaping
solution".

Salam !! (the way its meant in Persian :-)

 - Nadim


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