Re: shaping arabic

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Chris Whiting <chris at riverslime dot com> wrote:
> Nadim,
> 
> I saw your post on arabeyes about your shape_arabic.pl.  I tried it out and
> it seems to get very good results.  I need similar functionality because I
> am annotating arabic text (on a bitmap image) with ImageMagick and IM does
> not do this.

Great, I'm sure glad you found it useful - the more Arabic we see in Open
Source projects the happier I (and my Arabic community) get :-)  Do please
continue to do so with all your projects and push others to include us as
well :-)

> I do have one problem and that is with codepoint \x{0649}.  The mapping
> table entry is:
>      "649" => ["FEEF", "FBE8", "FBE9", "FEF0"],
> 
> When I use this I get an invalid character.  It is either the "FBE8" or
> "FBE9".  I am not sure if it is because my font does not support these
> characters (which is true), or because the table is wrong, or because the
> algorithm is incorrect.  I am using Ariel.  I tried arabic translucent but
> it had a lot of unsupported characters.

Good catch - you are correct those should not be included there.  I'll make
the proper correction.  They are part of Presentation Form-A which includes
various other glyphs that are not "Arabic" per se.  The FBE8 and FBE9 most
likely didn't show-up for you as they weren't in your font file, my inclusion
of them is a bug, but your need to recall them is incorrect as well.  Let
me explain.  In Arabic there are certain letters that are simply not used
in their initial and medial forms and U+0649 (ALEF_MAKSURA) is one of those.
I'd guess you were simply putting all the letters down to test them and
that's how you came across it where-as no one else has so far (again due to
the fact that no one would have used that letter in that illegal position).

I'll correct and checkin the change.  Thanks again.

> It seems that the mapping should be to "FEF0."  In my text (in all cases)
> the character to the left of \x{0649} is a space.
> 
> Anyways, can you help me out and can you let me know if you are building a
> module for cpan per the suggestion from Otakar.  I tried the other module
> called arabjoin but could not get it to work.  I like yours because it is
> already a function and doesn't require my source code to be utf-8.

I had various issues with arabjoin (I looked into it a LONG time ago) and
I would love to include this little 'shape_arabic.pl' script to CPAN.  If
you can help, I would certainly appreciate it - let me know what is needed.

> Thanks for the module and any help that you can give me.

BTW: you might want to look into these Arabic fonts (note their collage),

       http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot

Thanks for the heads-up and for any help with the CPAN inclusion.

Regards,

 - Nadim


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