Re: Characters and glyphs - was Re: [I18n]bdftruncate again ;)

["Moe Elzubeir" <elzubeir at cobaf dot coba dot unt dot edu>]

Biased or not biased, we don't really care ;) What we care about is that
XFree86's standard install does not truncate absolutely necessary Arabic
glyphs ;) That is all we want, be it in 10x20, on a separate font file,
whatever, we don't care. We just want all the Arabic glyphs in a
standard XFree86 core-fonts install. 

That way, when we want to add Arabic to xterm, or any other application
that would normally use fixed-width fonts, we don't have to distribute
hacks and fixes alongside with the standard out-of-the-box installs. 

--
Mohammed Elzubeir

>>> pablo at mandrakesoft dot com 01/24/02 14:11 PM >>>
Kaixo!

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 10:30:40AM -0800, Brian Stell wrote:
 
> > A simpler example is that 'A' and 'a' are the same character, but
> > different glyphs. If Unicode was being even-handed, it would
> > This example shows how biased Unicode is towards Latin characters.
> 
> This is quite true. It is a hard problem to see one's own bias.

Well, on the other side, you type differently an 'a' or an 'A'; while in
arabic, devanagari, thai, etc. you type noly letters and the shaping
is done for you.
So there is some logic for it after all.

Note also that Unicode is *also* very Arabic-biased, as it has all the
4 presentation forms (alongside with a 5th neutral one).