Re: Arabic Unicode fonts

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 07:44:14AM +0100, David Starner wrote:
> [Since this is my first post, I'll introduce myself. I'm a Debian maintainer
> and something of an amatuer i18n expert. I'm on many i18n lists -
> unicode at unicode dot org, i18n at xfree86 dot org, linux-utf8 at mail dot nl dot linux dot org dot  I
> actually know little of Arabic; I'm just here as a general i18n know-it-all
> and hopefully, to help the Arabization of Unix be done in such a way that
> all the wheels don't have to rebuilt for the Mongolization of Unix or the
> Zuluization of Unix.]

Hello and welcome! It's nice to see you are interested. Hopefully we can all
learn from one another, and enjoy intelligible conversations ;)

> 
> Unicode does not encode glyphs; it encodes characters. According to the
> rules of Unicode, Arabic Presentation Forms A and Arabic Presentation Forms
> B shouldn't be part of Unicode at all. (The main reason they exist is
> simplify using Unicode on primitive systems.) Arabic Presentation Form A and
> B shouldn't be used in files; use characters in the 0600-06FF block and the
> application should take the responsibility for using glyphs from
> Presentation Forms A & B if neccesary.

That in itself is a problem by the mere fact that you cannot trust the
individual applications to properly render the fonts nor provide them. It
seems to me that it defeats the whole purpose of a 'standard' font, and
negates transferrability.

> 
> To fully support Unicode, a font format like OpenType is needed. An OpenType
> font can take a characters, like U+062A, realize it's in the medial form,
> and display the appropriate glyph, without needing a Unicode character.
> Under Unix, OpenType is supported by FreeType 2. Since OpenType fonts are
> currently almost impossible to make under Unix, what about BDF fonts? Arabic

That is a problem that I was hoping Adobe would participate in. They are in
the process of creating a font development kit (or maybe it's already out)..
but it doesn't seem to support Unix/Linux. However, their questionnaire seems
to include them (their way of testing the waters?).

> Presentation Forms A & B is made for stuff like BDF fonts, and an argument
> can be made that every Arabic BDF font should include them. (Or rather,
> certain parts of those blocks; some of the ligatures in Presentation Forms A
> are almost impossible to legiblly write in a small fixed character-cell.
> Also several of those characters aren't used in the Arabic language.) The
> GNU Unifont includes most of Arabic, and Arabic Presentation Forms-A & B.

I think (and I may very well be wrong), that when Unicode says 'Arabic', they
don't really mean it the way we perceive it. They consider it to be the most
basic root for all the Arabic-derived languages.

-- 
Mohammed Elzubeir