RE: [cups.development] Re: CUPS Arabic support ?

["ahmad khalifa" <ahmadkhalifa at hotmail dot com>]

> From: Michael Sweet <mike at easysw dot com>
> Ahmad Khalifa wrote:
> > Are there any plans to support the Arabic Language in CUPS' texttops
> > filter ? thats where i think the problem is, or thats where it
> > should be dealt with.
> >
> > if there arent any near plans to do so, we at Arabeyes.org would be happy 
> > to supply a patch. and if so, would you be willing to accept
> > the patch and include it in your next releases, so we can get Arabic
> > support out-of-the-box ?
>
> We would welcome any patches, and in particular any freely
> redistributable Arabic fonts that we could include with CUPS.

great news, so a patch might be inluded in your 1.2.x cvs.
regarding fonts, the project Khotot under arabeyes.org has some
GPL fonts. take a look at the Khotot project page

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

> > printing UTF-8 files containing arabic text needs several text 
> > preparations, like Shaping and Bidirectionality. the flag "rtol" in
> > the file /charsets/utf-8 is not sufficient to perform the Unicode
> > Biderectional Algorithm (UAX #9), would you be willing to support
> > libraries that perform line Reordering, like FriBidi (which is already 
> > included in many distros) or IBM's ICU ??
> > ...
>
> The CUPS 1.2 code has a completely new I18N module for better UTF-8
> support, as well as adding support for different multibyte encodings.
> Text directionality is handled differently, however we have not added
> any rewriting code yet (it is also needed for other languages...)
>
> In general, we do not want to add the overhead of things like ICU,
> which are larger than CUPS itself!  In addition, we sublicense CUPS
> so we have to retain ownership of the core CUPS code...  Any code
> you contribute will need to be signed over to us to be included in
> CUPS.

i have exactly what you need. "minibidi" available also from arabeyes.org
its MIT licensed, so relicensing it or selling it wouldnt be an issue. or if 
any
other issues concerning licences arise, i'd be glad to change the licence.
minibidi is on arabeyes' cvs here...
http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/projects/adawat/minibidi/

now, after playing around with 1.2.x's source i identified these changes:
- adding arabic font
- adding line to utf-8 file, for 0600-06FF and Arabic Form-B FE70-FEFF
- changes in texttops.c

any other changes needed ?


ak.

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