Re: Fribidi and joining

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at bamdad dot org>]

On Fri, 23 Aug 2002, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 02:32:18AM +0430, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> The way we look at it is very simple. Aside from Hebrew and Yiddish,
> all other RTL languages require shaping. It's only logical
> to bundle them in one library. I also don't believe this addition
> will have such an impact on FriBiDi's lightness (though I can't
> really say for simplicity!)

As Roozbeh said, I'm mainly talking about conformancy, I cannot 
accept the idea of ignoring Override Marks (those rare cases) to 
get joining working.  fribidi has tried hard to implement these 
rare cases, how can I break all my works by including a broken 
joining?

Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted? 
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student? 
Does a good father allow a single child to starve? 
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code? 
	-- "Tao of Programming", translated by Geoffrey James

> > So until arabic joining/shaping (whatever you call prefer) gets
> > standard, fribidi's CVS will not let any arabic specific code in.
> 
> Sure. Again, I personally think the very discussion of "to include
> or not to include" is premature at this point. Let us first get it
> to work, in a compliant way that satisfies everyone.. then we can
> talk about whether it will be on anyone's CVS.
> 
> > 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
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the above ;)

I meant that many of us have bunch of code that "does something" 
about joining, ignoring the rare cases.  Lets release them 
officially, and ask people use them.  When in practice, we 
finally found that what should The Joining be, we can implement 
it the right way.

> > 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 have spent some time with it (the code).. I'm in the process
> of sending you something (later tonight), but this is more related
> to the farsigetty/akka discussion(s) we've had earlier.

Ok, waiting.  BTW, I'm quite busy this week, as I will be on a 
trip for two weeks after that, mean you are off reading my bitter 
mails for about one month :D.

> later

-- 
Behdad Esfahbod		2 Shahrivar 1381, 2002 Aug 24 
http://behdad.org/	[Finger for Geek Code]

#define is_persian_leap(y) ((((y)-474)%2820+2820)%2820*31%128<31)