PuTTY : Patch to shape arabic letters correctly

[Kamal Dalal <kamal_dalal at yahoo dot com>]

Salamat,

My name is Kamal Dalal. I have joined arabeyes developers and would like
to start contributing.

Warning : I am new to internationalization terms. Feel free to correct me
if it sounds like nonsense ;)

I am looking into patching PuTTY, and make it shape arabic letters
correctly. From what I see (using a Win2k Pro), a simple command like "cat
<utf-8 file>" displays all disconnected arabic letters. I heard from
Mohammad Elzubair that he has seen PuTTY display correct shapes after the
window refreshes itself. I could not see that behaviour. Can anybody on
the list confirm or deny ?

I am also considering using Microsoft's uniscribe package. According to
them , this package will do advanced unicode scripting including arabic
shaping. If anyone has good / bad experience with uniscribe, I would be
interested to hear about it.

If uniscribe turns out to be not feasable, the other alternative is to
write the shaping algorithm, and figure out how to mix languages. Sounds
like fribidi. Can someone point to a reusable piece of code that can
translate a stream of utf-8 into glyphs ? Ok, if not reusable, I can
compromise with a piece in any condition ;)

-Kamal Dalal


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