Arabic-Emacs questions

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Takahashi-san, I've been using Arabic emacs for a while now and have
a few questions/comments.  I'm not sure if there are any other lists
I ought to be including to address these things to a wider concerned
audience (do please forward to whomever you think is appropriate).

  1. I had asked this question of Eli (since he's intimately involved
     with emacs' releases and got no reply).  Is the 'composition-lock-mode'
     (ie. Arabic shaping; even without bidi) being slated to be included to
     emacs' proper source tree ?  Is there anything we can do (like contact
     Gerd, etc) to note its important to us to push for its inclusion ?

  2. Don't know if this is a bug, but its kinda annoying.  When in search
     mode, combined tanween characters are not shown correctly.  In short,
     if I do a search for LAA (0xfefb) (ie. lam (0x0644) + alef (0x0627))
     everything works great and the display functions properly.  But if I
     have say DAL (0x062f) followed by any of the tanween characters
     (FATHATAN .. SUKUN -- 0x064b .. 0x0652) the cursor upon a search ends
     up being placed in such a manner that it shifts to the left the tanween
     characters (which looks rather odd).  It would be more natural to
     highlight and to move the cursor in such a manner to include the
     tanween unless a person included a tanween him/herself in the search
     to exclude others.  Here's a convoluted example (assume I have a file
     with these 4 lines, ignore the a/b/c/d indicators),

       a. DAL-FATHATAN-NOON

       b. DAL-MEEM

       c. DAL-NOON

       d. DAL-KASRA-NOON

     so if I do a search for DAL-NOON, emacs should highlight and move
     the cursor (when the cursor is moved to that character-combo, the
     cursor ought to sit past the "NOON") for all of a,c,d.  When doing
     a search for say just DAL, all should be highlight and the cursor
     move past all the tanweens (ie, it should sit abutted to the NOON
     or MEEM - this is the problem area).  If I do a search for DAL-KASRA,
     only d would get highlighted with the cursor sitting, again, next to
     the "NOON".

  3. Along the same lines, when doing a search only for a tanween character
     (0x064b - 0x0652), emacs doesn't do any highlighting although it works
     properly.  Don't know what would seem natural here, but some highlight
     would be nice.

  4. This might generate some debate, but I thought I'd mention it.  It
     "might" be useful to have search ignore repeated TATWEEL (0x0640)
     unless the user specifies it.  Tatweel has no sound associated
     with it and is used as a visual extension and so one can conceive
     a scenario in which a person is looking for say MEEM followed
     by NOON and it "might" be useful to include those that have tatweel
     as well in the search results.  Again an example,

       a. MEEM-NOON
       b. MEEM-TATWEEL-NOON
       c. MEEM-TATWEEL-TATWEEL-TATWEEL-TATWEEL-TATWEEL-NOON

     And so a user doing a search for MEEM-NOON, all three above ought
     to get highlighted.  If on the other hand, a user does a search
     for MEEM-TATWEEL-NOON, then only that exact combination ought to
     be highlighted (b above).

  5. Any comments on the bidi addition (pseudo code) noted earlier to
     base line direction according to the first character in the line ?

Sorry for the long email; hopefully this is the kind of feedback you
were seeking.  In all honesty the most important of all these questions
in Question-1 above since it directly relates to the future :-)

Regards,

 - Nadim


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