Re: Looking for a shaping library..

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- shadi freesoft.jo wrote:
> Thanks for the info, I'm investigating on the possibility of integrating
> the shaping support in VIM into WINE, however as i can see there are lots
> of files need to be included. 
> 
> One thing i noticed is that arabic shaping at VIM requires UTF-8 encoding.
> Does that mean the string that to be shaped should be in UTF-8 and so all 
> manipulation functions should be utf8 aware, right?
> 
> Not sure why VIM didnt deal with UTF16 directly. Any ideads?

Salam Shadi,

NOTE: ___please___ reply to the 'developer' mailing-list, I shan't
reply to private emails on this topic any longer.  You are also
encouraged to subscribe to the mailing-list as your work is of interest
to us (as is most of freesoft.jo's) and the user/developer community at
large (ie. stay plugged-in and keep us informed of your plans and future
work so that we don't address and tackle the same issues).

With regards to UTF16/UTF8 - I highly suggest you do a bit more research
on the topic.  Here are a couple of links you might find useful and very
informing,

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
  http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/utfencodingforms/

As I'm not familiar with WINE and its internals, you can certainly do
whatever conversions you like easily, here's some sample/simple code,

  ftp://www.unicode.org/Public/PROGRAMS/CVTUTF/

	UCS4  to UTF16
	UCS4  to UTF8
	UTF16 to UCS4
	UTF16 to UTF8
	UTF8  to UTF16
	UTF8  to UCS4

I'm sure you'll be able to find many others (google is your friend).

As for why VIM did what it did, you'll have to ask its author (Bram) on
their mailing-lists (hosted via groups.yahoo.com).  But the same various
arguments that people have with regard to ASCII and UTF-8 and UTF-16, I'm
sure, will apply (data compactness, complexity, etc).  As far as I'm
concerned it really doesn't matter, all should and will work fine with
regard to Arabic.

Hope that helps.

Salam (say "Hi" to Kefah :-)

 - Nadim


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