Re: XR11R6.7 and X.org release

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

Salam,

While the news is a bit old, but it's still great.  Just to add
that the new X distribution, called "xorg" is hosted at
freedesktop.org, and already in Debian, Red Hat (Fedora), and
Mandrake development versions.

> - Xterm support for Bidi+shaping (hopefully using the new release of
> fribidi) (need the URL for the patches if you know them)

Unfortunately the big problem here is that many people (me
included partially) believe that bidi does not belong to the
terminal.  A very strong reason for that is that not all
languages can be eventually implemented in terminal (perhaps
Indic languages included).  BTW, the next big step is that there
is almost no standard for that.  Right now there are three
efforts for bidi terminal:  MLTerm, BiCon, and PuTTY; and I
believe each of them behaves differently, due to basically
different layers they apply bidi.

> - Xfonts should have a complete set of Arabic letters in their fonts
> (nadim, I think you are the one to give us specifics on this matter)

The authority for many X fonts has been Markus Kuhn, that has
included Arabic glyphs in some of his fonts, thanks to Roozbeh.
The old 10x20 bitmap font is one of them.  But the problem that
they are not typically included in distributions is a technical
problem with the X protocol which drastically slows down remote
clients with fonts including Unicode characters with large code
points (like Arabic presentation forms).

> These are the only two I can think of, please do think about more and
> add them to this thread. Once we are happy, we will find a liason
> between us and X.org to make sure the next major release of X.prg X
> server has these features.
>
> You feedback is greatly appreciated.
>
> Anmar

Cheers,
--behdad
  behdad.org