Re: Mad idea

[abdulhaq <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk>]

السلام عليكم

I slept on it and you're right, Nadim. Because of the small size of the 
open-source community interested in arabising things, there just isn't the 
resources for something that would take years and would inevitably have a 
lot of 'churn' in personnel. It would also be very difficult to persuade 
other communities to change their code to suit. In my grand idea, we would 
do that ourselves with patches, but.... well, I can still dream! I'm going 
to put it on my mental back-burner for now.

Regarding Thomas's ideas (and there are a number of very interesting pdf's 
out there) I do agree with him wholeheartedly that much of the 'mechanical 
maltreatment' of arabic can now be undone, by the use of powerful computers 
and carefully crafted algorithms. I love his metaphor that the only ligature 
that refused to die on the keyboard was the laam-alif one, and that this 
means 'NO!'.

If instead of looking inside your arabic books, look on the spine... now why 
can't arabic on the computer be like THAT?

Thomas for instance notes that one of the features of properly written arabic 
is that the nuqaaT are added after all the base forms (i.e. without dots) 
have been written first. This allows the dots to be placed in an attractive 
and unambiguous manner. This is a particularly big issue for ligature-type 
characters, _which they all would be_ in the new scheme.

We are all used to printed arabic now and it looks (to us) neat, tidy and 
nice. However, to a trained eye and someone who has spent a lot of time with 
well written manuscripts, modern printed arabic is relatively ugly (I don't 
include myself in that group but I'd like to be).

Anyway, I'm off to my qur'anic lesson now so,

و السلام
عبد الحقّ


>
> I know very little on this topic but I do know that new/changed
> technologies are an uphill battle in multiple fronts.  I'd guess
> unicode would favor incremental changes as opposed to major
> overhauls/shifts (just a thought).  And to be fully honest, I don't
> quite understand how this is all to be done and whether we can expect
> the font community to embrace such an effort (we have font problems
> as is _today_ (ie. generating more fonts and more Arabic inclusion)
> with well understood constructs no less).
>
> Salam.
>
>  - Nadim
>
>
>
>
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