[Fwd: Arabic patch: Todo list?]

[Steve Hall <digitect at mindspring dot com>]

Hello Arabeyes.org,

Another developer on the Vim list forwarded some comments regarding
the patch for Arabic support. In case some of you aren't subscribed, I
thought it would be useful to pass along.

Steve Hall  [ |digitect|*|mindspring|*|com| ]


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Arabic patch: Todo list?
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 02:57:10 +0100
From: Antoine J. Mechelynck <antoine dot mechelynck at belgacom dot net>
To: <vim at vim dot org>

Hi Vimmers,

These last few days I have been trying out the Arabic support newly present
in Vim 6.1 as distributed in binary (by Cream) for Windows.

My general impression is: (as everything concerning vim): Great!

Just a few remarks:
    - The first day I had several crashes (protection violations, I think;
CrashGuard intercepted them). Maybe I had been trying to use too big a font.
Now I set 'gfn' height it to "only" 20, I save my work frequently, and the
problem seems to have disappeared
    - In vocalised text, some combining characters (e.g. sukuun IIRC) cause
a break in the script (the consonant at that point assumes its "ending"
presentation shape and the next one [if any] its "beginning" one). (This is
a minor detail: the text is correctly generated in memory and on the disk,
and it is still better than what NS7 does: last I tried, NS7 placed the
diacritics between constonants instead of over them, producing a very ugly
"chopped" script.) Also (and this is common with NS7, IE6 and WordPad) there
must be no combining characters on the laam of a laam-alif ligature, or it
won't be displayued right. (Temporary solution: omit them; or maybe in the
case of long "a" place the fat'ha on the alif of prolongation instead of on
the laam. The result displays more or less aceeptably but is not the
"received" way to do it AFAIK.)
    - The Hebrew, Farsi and Unicode helpfiles are useful; however, IMHO it
would be nice to have a helpfile addressing the peculiarities of Arabic
editing. If nothing is forthcoming, I might even write a first draft myself;
however my experience is limited (hark, hark! help welcome): I have been
using it as yet only in Unicode and only under Windows. And I don't know the
language yet, only the alphabet, but I am learning (alas, I don't anymore
learn languages as easily as when I was a young boy). Off the top of my
head, I think of at least the following topics for such a helpfile:
        * Presentation forms (not much to say, they are mostly handled
automatically)
        * Fonts (again, not much to say, I found perfectly workable
monospace glyphs under the standard "Courier New" typeface -- but I already
had "International Language Support" in Windows, downloaded over the Net for
various encodings including Arabic).
        * Numbers: (a)My Arabic fonts (not only Courier New but also, for
use in other programs, Traditional Arabic and Arabic Transparent) include 2
series of Arabic "Indic" digits as well as Western digits, but I haven't
found the Arabic-Indic digits on the keyboard. Some navigators, however, use
them to render all numbers when the context is Arabic. (b) There should be a
remark somewhere about numbers using LTR orientation in Arabic.
        * The use of combining characters (shadda, sukuun, 3 vowels with or
without nunation, even alif after laam is treated as combining). ("Optional"
combining characters such as hamza, madda and wasla seem not to have their
own glyphs; the font has the necessary glyphs for their "pre-combined"
codepoints however.)
        * Mixing LTR (Latin text, Arabic numbers, etc.) and RTL (arabic
words and sentences) in a single file (be it for text and digits, for
bilingual text, for RTL Arabic text embedded in LTR HTML tags, etc.)
        * Exchanging files with other programs: I have already tried
Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft WordPad. Here also help
from users of various programs on various platforms shall be welcome.
        * Useful options (such as :set delcombine) and mappings (for
instance, :map <F8> :set rightleft!<CR> -- of course any {lhs} will do).

Some of these topics are already handled elsewhere, for instance under
Hebrew or under Unicode; but IMHO it would be nice to have a single place
(found by doing :help Arabic) with explanations for what isn't handled
elsewhere and links to what is.

What do you think?

Note: I haven't yet tried to make Vim understand M$'s "Arabic" option of the
Intrenational keyboard (my usual keyboard is fr_BE). Until now I have been
typing all Arabic text either by importing Unicode text files from WordPad
(in UCS-2 le, which I convert to UTF-8 with BOM using gvim) or by using
Ctrl-V u xxxx in gvim itself(see :help i_CTRL-V_digit). I will soon be
trying out the digraph method (and if I don't find workable digraphs I'll
make some for myself)

Tony
a happy user of gvim 6.1.300