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Re: Patch to remove presentation forms from Arabic xkeyboard layout



On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 01:32:55PM +0200, Mohammed Sameer wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 04:58:02PM +0200, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> > I just submitted a patch[1] that removes the various Lam-Alef presentation
> > forms from Arabic keyboard layout, this should temporally fix the
> > well-known lam-alef problem[2]. To avoid confusing the user, the b,
> > shoft-b, shitf-g and shift-t keys in the Arabic keyboard (should produce
> > لا, لآ, لأ and لإ respectively) will now produce nothing.
> > 
> > 1. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13894
> > 2. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8195
> > 
> 
> No. I'm sure they are there for a reason even if we don't know what it is.
> Isam Baiazidi was the one who added them. I'd rather ask him about the consequences
> first before removing them. I know they are causing problems and I'm always implementing
> workarounds for them but we need to know why were they added.
> 
For whatever the reason, this shouldn't ever happened, presentation
forms are here for computability with legacy systems and shouldn't be
used to encode text, this is even discouraged[1] by Unicode standard.

Even if we agreed on necessity of using them, then we will need 12 keys
for them; 4 letters × 3 contextual forms, cause we are now just using
one contextual form (isolated) for all cases, with is IMHO non-sense and
is the source of the rendering problem.

Having a separate key for Lam-Alef belongs to metal typesetting era and,
for no good reason, it survived in the digital era. 

I can't see any good use for them, however, I had no idea who added them
to ask.

1. http://unicode.org/faq/middleeast.html#0

-- 
 Khaled

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