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Fwd - [putty] Re: Arabic in PuTTY

I'm cleaning our my mailbox and I seem to forgot to forward this to
the list for archival.  I'm doing so in hopes of addressing the issues
noted within.

 - Nadim

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Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> One quick important note though that I think needs to be addressed.
> The fonts included with regard to Arabic leave alot to be desired.
> There are currently only 2 fonts that even support Arabic, namely
> 'Courier New' and 'Simplified Arabic Fixed'

As Owen observes, PuTTY doesn't include any fonts at all; those must
be the fonts already installed on your system. (I don't even _have_
Simplified Arabic Fixed.)

> it looks like the harakat (the diacritics) weren't placed/spaced
> properly especially in its "bold" style which is what I use and so
> you barely see them (well, you see a faint bottom section of the
> shadda (U+0651) for instance).

PuTTY currently displays diacritics by simply overlaying the
diacritic glyph on the primary glyph.

This is not ideal; in cases where a precomposed version of the
character exists, it probably ought to be used in place of this
overlaying trick, on the grounds that it's more likely to place the
diacritic in a legible position!

For unshaped scripts, I think the simplest specification would be to
normalise every character cell's contents into Unicode Normalisation
Form C or KC (I haven't worked out which yet), either on output
(just for display) or possibly even on input (so that cut and paste
returned normalised text as well).

For Arabic, I don't think it's that simple. The shaping code would
have to do the job: it would need to be told about diacritics on the
characters it was working with (which it will need anyway to handle
lam-alef correctly), and would have to pick different presentation
forms where they were available.

> In passing, http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot

I know about that - all my own testing has been done using the
ae_fonts_mono X font from that page! :-)

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "infinite loop _see_ loop, infinite"
<anakin at pobox dot com>     - Index, Borland Pascal Language Guide

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