Re: [I18n]bdftruncate again ;)

[Markus Kuhn <Markus dot Kuhn at cl dot cam dot ac dot uk>]

Brian Stell wrote on 2002-01-24 17:48 UTC:
> (Forgive me if I'm repeating the obivious)
> 
> Unicode is designed to be a character set and encoding
> but not a glyph encoding.

Forgive me if I'm repeating the obivious, but for Arabic, Unicode
provides apart from the Arabic alphabet

  0600..06FF; Arabic

also a glyph encoding in blocks 

  FB50..FDFF; Arabic Presentation Forms-A
  FE70..FEFE; Arabic Presentation Forms-B

and these Unicode encoded glyph forms (which are present in 10x20.bdf)
is what the arabeyes folks are interested in trying to use as an
intermediate solution.

Obviously, these glyph code positions will/should not be used in
documents (searching, etc. would be a nightmare), but for the
communication between a non-Arabic aware display engine (such as X11
XDrawString16) and an Arabic character->glyph recoding engine such as

  http://czyborra.com/arabjoin/

the Arabic Presentation Forms do a pretty fine job, unless you have
extremely high typographic requirements, which is typically not the case
in plaintext applications.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>