Arabic fonts [WAS: Re: Arabic Vim patch rewrite and update]

[Steve Hall <digitect at mindspring dot com>]

  [cross posted to developer at arabeyes dot org for solicitation of
  Arabic-supporting font information, read below]

Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> Nadim -
> >

  [font discussion regarding Vim patch for Arabic support]

> > Yeah, but that goes for any language - people will have to be
> > savvy enough to know where to get fonts given some semblance of
> > what to look for (in this instance ISO-10646-1 with Form-B glyphs)
>
> The idea of Unicode is that you install one font and will be able to
> edit all languages. Did you contact Markus Kuhn about including the
> Arabic characters in his fonts (which are used in Xfree 4.x)?

Are the fonts on arabeyes.org the only known Linux fonts that support
Arabic characters? How many of these packages (from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34866) support
it in UTF-8 (as required by the Vim patch)?

    sharif.univ
    lateef.shaikh_fonts
    kacst_fonts
    haydar_fonts
    ae_fonts         <= just this one?

Are there any others, even proprietary ones?

My biggest problem in figuring out the patch was fonts. (Which
admittedly had nothing to do with the patch.) On Windows the *only*
font I've found to support Arabic characters in Unicode is Microsoft's
Courier New.

I'd like to compile and post a list of all known fonts that support
Arabic in Unicode/UTF-8 if this would help. Please email me directly
with as much data about the font as you can:

  Font name
  URL (if available for download, free or proprietary)
  Platform
  Version

I'll mail developer at arabeyes dot org when the list updates.


--
Steve Hall  [ digitect at mindspring dot com ]

Cream... the Vim text editor in sheep's clothing!
  http://cream.sourceforge.net