Re: X.org influence

[Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org>]

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Salam,

On Saturday 08 May 2004 11:44, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 14:04, Munzir Taha wrote:
> > Behdad, Nadim, yes these are Urdu characters and I too doesn't benefit at
> > all from their inclusion since I don't know Urdu, but the point is Arabic
> > and Farsi installation support can't be included in Mandrake and may be
> > others easily if there is no unique font that contains Arabic/Farsi/Urdu
> > glyphs especially the ones mentioned by Pablo of MandrakeLinux.com,
> > Please tell you non-team ;) to consider these 7 characters. At least,
> > explain this viewpoint to them.
>
> I understand the viewpoint. If this was Pashto or Kurdish or something
> else, we would have agreed and done it. But the fonts lack the Urdu look
> and feel (Nastaliq and all), and many Pakistanis can't even read them
> easily, being used to Nastaliq. I would appreciate if you tell this to
> Pablo, or anybody else who is blocking Arabic or Persian because of the
> lack of a good font for Urdu.

I agree with Roozbeh here. The finality (in distros) would be to have a font 
per language (read a font per group of languages that agree on the 'artistic' 
design ;-) So having a _single_ font for Arabic and Persian (and Urdu !) is 
simply out of the question. Either Arabic or Persian or Urdu people will have 
difficulties to read the font and thus they simply won't use the distro.

However, this should not block us from adding Persian glyphs in Arabic fonts, 
Urdu glyphs in Persian fonts and vice versa :-) Unless you say you want to 
keep them missing to oblige distros to use different fonts ;-)

BTW, I am not aware of distros blocking Arabic/Persian inclusion because of 
the fonts ?! I just remember recently Behdad was posting to the Fedora 
mailing list saying that the font used for Persian was an Urdu (?) one... Was 
that fixed ? If this is still the case, we should insist and tell the 
distro(s) people that the case of languages that use Arabic characters is 
totally different from case of European languages.

Salam,

- -- 
Youcef R. Rahal
Arabeyes.org
http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal
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