Re: [I18n]Re: U+3000 limit

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 03:54:16PM +0000, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> 
> You cannot just take any old application and assume it will support
> Arabic glyph shaping.  Clients (or, more precisely, widget sets) will
> need to be adapted to rpovide for glyph shaping.  Doing this will be
> vastly easier and more general if you use Xft rather than core fonts.
> 
> The point of whether old clients will be able to see Arabic glyphs in
> core fonts is therefore moot, as only new clients will be able to
> display Arabic in a satisfactory manner.

My point is, if you cannot guarantee that even the legacy applications will be
able to support Xftt then it would make everyone happy (at least all the Arab
speakers/users) if we have a full/complete Arabic core font. This would
satisfy the applications which will NOT support Xft. 

An ideal scenario would be that during the install, two files would be
copied on to the fonts directory, a truncated 10x20 and a complete 10x20ar (or
whatever you wish to call it). At the very least we can know for sure that
these fonts exist. To what I understand so far, the subsetting system has been
in fact implemented (and so I still don't understand why the truncation is still
needed). 

What we (Arabeyes) are trying to do, is to make sure that any kind of support
for Arabic is going to be possible, regardless of the circumstances and/or
obsoleteness of a technology. We are well aware of the need to provide glyph
shaping, but you can leave that for us to worry about ;) At the very least, we
would feel very comfortable and satisfied to know that the full Arabic font is
in fact available during a standard XFree86 install. 

Someone has suggested that we include such a file, and I/we are opting to go
with that option. It would make our lives easier, and we can stop bugging you
about it and move on to other pressing issues ;) 

> According to my Jordanian office neighbour, Microsoft Windows does a
> perfectly satisfactory job of supporting Arabic; and as far as I know
> they use OpenType.
> 

And we would like that 'perfectly satisfactory' support to be under XFree86
and Linux/Unix systems across-the-board. We are not stopping at this font
issue. But, it is one of the items on our TODO list (and it's a long one!). 
Help us make that a reality ;)

Thanks.
-- 
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/|
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