Re: Arabic Unicode fonts

["David Starner" <dstarner98 at aasaa dot ofe dot org>]

From: "Mohammed Elzubeir" <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>

> 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.

I understand the issues, but the Arabic shaping algorithim is well defined
(chapter 8 of the Unicode standard, which you can find online.) At least if
someone doesn't do it right, you can point out the error to them.

> 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?).

I don't get the impression Adobe cares about Unix/Linux. We're still a
version behind on Acrobat Reader, for example, and pretty much nothing else
has been ported to Linux.

> 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.

Yes. Usually, when Unicode says Arabic, they're talking about the script
that's used by Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Kurdish and others, and formerly
Malay, Turkish and others.

--
David Starner - dstarner98 at aasaa dot ofe dot org
"The pig -- belongs -- to _all_ mankind!" - Invader Zim