Re: Kdiff3:arabic_shape

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Joachim, I'm forwarding your mail to the 'developer' mailing-list.  Some
replies are noted below.

--- Joachim Eibl <joachim dot eibl at gmx dot de> wrote:
> I'm author or KDiff3 (a file and directory comparison and merge tool).
> 
> A while ago Gregg asked me to add support for arabic for KDiff3 and
> I already added Unicode and right to left support. But shaping is still
> missing. (http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/kdiff3_0.9.87b.zip)

In passing, Gregg has also brought the subject of ignoring some
characters while diff'ing and to that end I suggested we go straight
to 'diff' utility developers (instead of adding this feature to the
overlaying GUI).  I then posted this email,

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-utils/2004-12/msg00035.html

to no avail.  Could you comment on it and see if any developer
working on 'diff' would be interested (I'd guess this would be a
pretty useful option no matter what language you use) ?

> Gregg already gave me much information on how the shaping works, but perhaps 
> you can also help. The main difference between vim and KDiff3 is that within 
> KDiff3 the internal data is in Unicode-16, whereas in vim it is in UTF-8.

I don't think VIM is the best example to follow - but it's out there :-)
I'm not sure why you are using UTF-16 and what advantage you are getting
out of it (there are all sorts of endian issues involved among others).

Here are some links that talk about this topic in more detail that might
help,

  http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html
  http://czyborra.com/utf/
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

> So I can't directly use the arabic_shape-function from vim, which is
> difficult for me to use anyway. What I need is a function that takes
> and gets a Unicode-16-string as input and  output. And if the output
> string has more or less characters than the input, then I would also
> need an array that tells which character-indices from either string
> correspond to the other string.
> 
> Could you please provide that or help me on how to get there?

We can try (I've never used or looked into UTF-16 in any great detail) -
I'm sure there are those that have tackled similar problems that will
chime-in.

PS: you might want to subscribe to the developer list.

  http://www.arabeyes.org/mailinglists.php

Regards,

 - Nadim



		
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