Re: a software library for multilingualisation

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- TAKAHASHI Naoto <ntakahas at m17n dot org> wrote:
> We have been working on developing a software library to
> multilingualise Unix/Linux software.  Our library helps writing
> application programs that need to display/input/edit various languages
> and scripts including, of course, Arabic.
> 
>   http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib/

Thank you very much for the pointer/reminder !!

> The font used there is Riwaj.ttf.  I do not read Arabic, but it looks
> farely beautiful.  However, the font fails to position vowel signs
> correctly.  Look at this.
> 
>   http://www.m17n.org/ntakahas/tmpdir/poem.png
> 
> I have investigated all the opentype fonts available from the Arabeyes
> web site. Unfortunately, none of them had appropriate GPOS features.
> So I imagine that vowels signs have little importance to native
> speakers.

This is the first example I've come across in which a font finally has a
GPOS table and I'm dazed and confused :-)  Needless to say, we need to
add this table to all our fonts (mind you various applications out there
can function properly without GPOS), but now the question is how ?  From
the looks of what I saw its overly convoluted and difficult (and I doubt
that this is done by hand - please say it ain't so :-)  I've used Fontlab
on a windows machine to do font-related hacking in the past, yet I don't
see an automatic or programmatic means to do this.  I'll be reading this
in case others are interested in this topic (and I sure hope there are
others),

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/type/opentype/gpos.jsp

In short, we have a number of fonts (in the khotot project [1]) and we
would very much like to bring all those fonts upto speed by including
GPOS to all of 'em -- any ideas, pointers, help ?  All we need is someone
to do one of our fonts to show us how its done.

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

Thanks again & Regards,

 - Nadim


		
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