Printing Arabic (Bidi+shaping)

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Greetings, I'm not sure if this 'printing' group is the right place
to ask this question (or start a discussion regarding this topic),
but after a visit to your site it might seem appropriate.

  http://base.freestandards.org/printing

A few of the Arab linux/unix developers are looking into what its
going to take to add native (ie. from the terminal-emulator/shell)
support to printing Arabic.  Arabic, as some might not be aware, is
a somewhat complicated, demanding language in that it (along with a few
other languages out there) requires,

 + Bidi    (Bi-directionality -- Arabic is a Right-to-Left (RTL) language)
 + Shaping (character glyphs depend on their location within the word;
            meaning the same character looks different based on where
            it falls within the word)

What's stored on disk is not what's displayed and as such printing
needs to reflect that fact.  In other words, whatever processing
currently takes place to display Arabic (and the other RTL languages)
needs to take place prior to sending the data to the printer (this is
all in the framework of UTF-8).

As such, the following questions have come up,

 + Is this the right place to hold this discussion ? if not, suggestions ?
 + What information is out there to further this development ?
 + Has anyone (or group) started along these lines (as noted various
   other languages require this as well)
 + With the various printing applications out there, including

     http://lpr.sourceforge.net
     http://people.ssh.fi/mtr/genscript/
     http://www.lprng.com
     + others

   Which one should we approach/tackle first ?  Who might seem
   interested on the application side to jump into this ?
 + How does postscript fit into this (if at all) ?
   ie. pre-process vs. post-process
 + How does www.cups.org fit into all this ?

For those that are _not_ familiar with Bidi, do please take a look at
fribidi (note: Bidi is a unicode standard),

  http://fribidi.sf.net

PS: do please reply to all those CC'ed.

Best Regards,

 - Nadim (www.arabeyes.org)


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