Re: BAD BUG (Was: Updated Windows Vim binaries with Arabic support )

["Antoine J. Mechelynck" <antoine dot mechelynck at belgacom dot net>]

Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:
[...]
> Tony did you figure out what the problem was - I saw on the vim list
> that
> you had some old/corrupt files (I think) hanging around; is the
> Arabic patch innocent of these and other troubles ?

I had a spurious file but it was a .txt file -- an older version of
scroll.txt, with a slightly different name. No possibility for that to
influence fontface presentation. I haven't reinstalled any vim version later
that 6.1.300 yet. Now I note in the font selection dialog that I have
several national versions of Courier New installed: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic,
Hebrew, Arabic, etc. With cDEFAULT at the end of the 'guifont' setting the
6.1.300 binary uses whichever of them has the glyph for the character to be
displayed. I suspect that the newer binary, with that same 'guifont' setting
(i.e., when &gfn == "Courier_New:h20:cDEFAULT", which is a non-X11 setting),
uses only the Latin glyphs. What do you think? If that is the problem it
would probably lie in some patch later than 300 and either not with the
Arabic patch at all, or else with the way that Arabic character display for
UTF-8 interfaces with the rest of gvim under non-X graphical display
interfaces in general and/or MS-Windows in particular. And that kind of
problem will need to be addressed: specifying cARABIC is not good enough,
since sooner or later someone (I or someone else) will write a UTF-8
document with not only Latin and Arabic in it but also some other script
like Greek, Cyrillic or Hebrew.

[...]
> Much thanks and I look forward to more feedback.
>
>  - Nadim
[...]

Don't worry, you will sooner or later (probably sooner) get that feedback;
and you are the one to be thanked, as without you I (and maybe some others)
might be using gvim (with no spacific Arabic patches) to create Arabic
files -- it works, after a fashion: namely, only "isolated" presentation
forms are displayed in gvim, as if it were some kind of Hebrew with unusual
(for Hebrew) character shapes.

Tony.