an errata and BiDi text printing ToDo

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

In the Arabic-HowTo at 
http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/howto/arabic-howto-en/printinarabic.html

let me quote this:

------------------
You can also use TrueType fonts,

$ txtbdf2ps.pl -UTF-8 \
               -bidi \
               -font=/PATH/PATH/PATH/font.ttf \
               -text=arabic_file > output.ps
------------------

txtbdf2ps.pl doesn't seem to support this option. May be you have confused it 
with uniprint which has the -font truetype-font option!!

This is an example of how to use it to print text files
uniprint -font /usr/share/fonts/ttf/arabic/KacstDecorative.ttf arabic_file.txt

I also want to point out that with this correction I can't understand why we 
are missing anything in the BiDi printing ToDo at arabeyes wiki page.

I _can_ use the command line to print text files using lpr (uniprint will call 
lpr) as in my example

> >Were you able to do this from the command-line and get fully shaped
> >and bidi'ed print-outs ?  If so, can you give us details on what it
> >is that one needs to do or setup to get it to work properly.
Yes, fully shaped and bidi'ed printout. (actually not to lie I have no printer 
but I intercepted the generated .ps file and found it OK which is completely 
enough to prove it)

>Again we are interested in,
 >$ lpr my_arabic_utf8.txt
no, we should be interested in printing text files from the command line. lpr 
is a tool to send files to a spool. We need to prepare/filter the file first. 
A tool is already available. (Kamal Dalal has thankfully pointed this out 
before)

If we have one tool that will do a job perfectly well, we should never run 
after the 100's other tools (a2ps, txt2ps, text2ps, texttops, ascii2ps ...) 
to patch them to do the already can be done job. One should not also run 
after merging all these tools into one monolithic tool unless one believes in 
CISC to the bone ;)

Again, is there any deficiency in printing BiDi text whether from the command 
line or from an application if the correct tool is used?


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