Re: VIM + Arabic complex characters - done

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Isam Bayazidi wrote:
> 
> On Friday 08 March 2002 10:28 pm, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> > After a bit of hair-pulling, I was fortunate enough to recently be able
> > to add the Arabic meta-combining abilities (also termed "complex character
> > handling") to allow for the display "LAA" and its sisters as apposed to
> > seeing the odd combinations of LAM+ALEF :-)
>
> Can you please tell us in short what did you do ? I didn't use the patch 
> until now .. but I will start so in next hour .. I am intersted to know how 
> did you fix it .. can you please elaborate a little about it ?

This will all sound foreign unless you really dive into the VIM code
itself, but in short VIM has the ability to compose characters (ie. the
ability to put upto three characters on top of each other - its there
to make chinese, I believe, doable).  What I did, per various exchanges
CC'ed to 'developer' with Bram, set out to fool VIM into thinking that the
ALEF (and its cousins) following the LAM are "composing" characters.  That
took care of them not appearing (I still think Bram should have agreed on
adding a new feature to VIM - "display-skip", but without his buy-in its
fruitless to proceed in that direction).  I then had to strip the composer
itself so that VIM doesn't draw that glyph on top of the LAM and replaced
the LAM itself with the LAA (and sisters :-)  I also had to take care of
various things like moving forwards/backwards by skipping over this phantom
composer.

That's pretty much it in short without getting into various complications -
for further details you'll really have to jump into the code itself to see
what's being done.

Salam..

 - Nadim


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