Re: Malay's Jawi Script & other extended arabic

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Hasbullah Bin Pit <sebol at ikhlas dot com> wrote:
> I'm Hasbullah Bin Pit from Malaysia, doing a lots of Malay l10n stuff
> I think Arafat Madeni knows me.

Welcome aboard.

> I cant display "Ga" because of it's not supported yet by unicode & no 
> font for it yet.

You need to engage unicode.org to include those glyphs/characters that
Malay might require.  We ourselves are in the process of looking at
some missing glyphs that are required for the Quran (Mohammed.Yousif
produced a preliminary list and is to complete it soon we hope :-)

> What's come to my mind is font from Arabeyes. I've tested
> ae_fonts1_ttf_1.0.tar.bz2 and Kacst* , most of it doesnt contained with 
> extra jawi char.

Bare in mind that the intent of khotot was to address our immediate
Arabic needs.  We have since been asked to add Farsi, Urdu and now
Malay which we don't have problems with, but we are very short handed.

So if you are willing to supply the glyphs to include then great
otherwise supply us with all the info (encoding, exact look-n-feel
of glyph and any shaping issues, etc and we'll try to get to 'em at
some point in the future maybe :-).  It would be best to simply list
out what is required as such (graphical table would do),

  Glyph/Character encoding_num            Glyph/Character Look

and list things out.  Since we have to abide by unicode's standard we
can only include unicode approved encodings (state them if they are).

> So, I'm proposing Khotot project to include entry Jawi extra char in the 
> future. It's just extra dots, extra line, placement of dot.

Sure, but again we are short handed and it's not a priority for us, so
if you or others would like to help out in this regard, please do.  The
files are on CVS, grab a file and add what you like to it for us to test.
If you (or someone else) have interest in this regard, as noted, Farsi
and Urdu would like to be included as well so keep 'em in mind.

> to simplify what's I'm saying is
> "Suggest to include extended arabic char in Arabeyes's font"

Noted.  Easier said than done - again we are short handed and don't have
anyone dedicated working on this.

> I'm not yes familiar with font etc, can u guy suggest some tool to edit 
> or view fonts?

On windows, FontLab and FCP are good tools (they are not free).  On
Linux/Unix look at various tools and links (google is your friend too),

  http://www.arabeyes.org/resources.php

Make sure to also read about GSUB and GPOS for shaping issues.

BTW: font issues are better discussed on the 'general' mailing-list.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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