Re: linux arabic standardization

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Chahibi Youssef <chahibi at gmail dot com> wrote:
> Do you know Hani Bakir ? He's responsible of the AlKhawareezmi Projet
> and I read that he participated in arabization in Life Makers web
> magazine #1 ( Amrkhaled.net ) , do you think he can help us ?

Anyone that is interested in working on mutual goals is welcome.
 
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/ : 
> What's the problem with arabic and presentation of Qur'an ?

This is a very involved/long subject which has been discussed a number
of times (on 'general' list and countless times in private with various
people).  The point is that as the chart stands today we are unable
to display the Quran text without using OpenType technology (you see
there are some characters that are not accounted for in the charts
and so since OpenType and TrueType fonts allow the embedding of small
programs some have suggested that we write a pseudo routine to 'hack'
things so they work using private set-aside regions for our characters).
A number of us, namely M.Yousif (and I certainly don't want to speak for
him) and myself, are _very much_ against that idea since it,

 1. Brings forth a work-around and NOT a solution (we want to standardize
    solutions and not patch problems).  As it stands you will NOT be able
    to find a single application's Quran font that will work with another
    application (that is 100% due to having no standard means to display
    all the needed characters).
 2. Excludes a number of applications (such as console and low memory
    embedded devices, simple editors (vim/emacs), etc) that either don't
    use or opt not to use advanced font technologies (such as opentype
    and/or truetype.

So we tried to put together an informal proposal [1] to ask Unicode for
the 6 needed/missing characters, yet when we floated our proposal for
initial comment it was met with stiff resistance to our great surprise.

 [1] http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/tmp/qu_prop.pdf

Do we need help on this front, yes - but we need help primarily in
penetrating Unicode.org.  We need more Arabic language experts (and
native Arabic speakers) to join and participate in Unicode.org so that
we have a say in how things are specified for us using our own language.
That is a key objective we all need to pursue anytime we talk to various
high-level organizations, government people and/or university researchers
and linguists (in the hope that they might help).

Hope that sheds some light on the topic (brief and to the point :-)

Salam.

 - Nadim


		
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