Khotot Project Fonts Should Have Names in Arabic

["Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager at umich dot edu>]

Salaam, everyone,

I recently proposed a font selection "widget" which will classify
fonts into script categories.  For example, Arabic fonts would be
automagically classified into an "Arabic" category, Chinese fonts
into a "Chinese" category, and so on, thus providing a degree of
sane organization to font collections on Open Source platforms.
The intent is that this widget should be
used in Open Source desktop software such as Gnome and KDE.
Please see the proposal here:

  http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontdialog/

... to get a feeling for what I am talking about.  Be sure to click on
the "Solution" tab to see some illustrative mockups of what this
software component might look like.  The original announcement of the proposal
was posted to the Gnome i18n, KDE, OpenOffice, Gimp, and Inkscape
developer lists.  You can review the original announcement by clicking on
the "Comments And Feedback" tab on the above-mentioned web page.

Having proposed this, I and a colleague of mine are now working on
creating an an implementation of the proposal in software (Please feel free
to write me if you are interested in the details).

In the proposal I note that many non-Latin fonts, including the Arabeyes.org
fonts, only have TTF names in English.  As a solution, I propose using
alias names in an XML configuration file, something like this:

<fontmenu>
 <category>
  Arabic

  <font> 
   ae_AlArabiya
     <!-- THIS ENTRY LACKS AN ALIAS -->
  </font>
  
  <font> 
   ae_arab
   <alias>
    عرب
   </alias>
  </font>
  
  <font> 
   ae_khalid
   <alias>
    خلد
   </alias>
  </font>
  
  <font> 
   ae_tholoth
   <alias>
    ثلث
   </alias>
  </font>
  
 </category>
</fontmenu>

Although the idea of font aliases will probably work, after I thought about this
some more, I have to ask the question:

     Why not just put Arabic names directly into
     the fonts themselves ?

This is already being done for a number of East Asian Open Source fonts, such as
the following:

   FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/fireflysung.ttf
   FAMILY-1> AR PL New Sung
   FAMILY-2> 文鼎ＰＬ新宋
   STYLE---> Regular

   FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/cwkai.ttf
   FAMILY-1> cwTeXKai
   FAMILY-2> cwTeX 楷書
   STYLE---> Medium

   FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/UnDotumBold.ttf
   FAMILY-1> UnDotum
   FAMILY-2> \uc740 \ub3cb\uc6c0
   STYLE---> Bold

(See: http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/ for references for these
 and other Open Source fonts)

In the above, "FAMILY_1" is the first entry in the TTF names table for "family", and
"FAMILY_2" is the second entry.

If the Arabeyes Khotot project were in the future to release the Arabic font collection
with the very small addition of the FontFamily name in Arabic in the second slot of the
names table, then there will be less need to use "alias" names in the font selection 
widget that I proposed.  This will make my job easier :-) .  But of course, the point
is not *really* to make my job easier (although that is nice too!), but to provide the
best possible solution to the Open Source community at large.

I look forward to hearing your responses to this proposal, as well as any additional
comments that any of you may have regarding the Font Selection Widget proposal in general.

Ma Salaame--

-- Ed Trager