Re: Arabic Unicode fonts

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

From: "Mohammed Elzubeir" <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>
> I don't think the problem is whether Unicode fonts and algorithms are
> capable of doing all of the above. They are. The question is, is this 
> the best way to do it? Isn't it too expensive on the computer resources?
> Why is it dealt with differently from other Latin characters (note Nadim's
> note on the small and capital letters, and encoding regarldess of
> keyboard mapping).

The lengthy reply I sent on this thread should hopefully have answered some
of these questions. In short, the small/capital distinction in Latin can't
be handled automatically for all but a few, unreliable, cases, whereas
Arabic shaping can for almost all cases. Shaping is just a table lookup,
which is takes much less time than drawing the glyphs to the screen. (The
actual reason that Unicode did it this way seems to be that ISO-8859-6 did
it this way. But the above are the justifications.)

Mahin said "While I am in no position even to express an opinion on Uni-code
/Utf-8 but there is some room for changes / improvements at this early
stages.". If he's talking about changes in Unicode, there really is no
chance that Unicode will be changed at this point. The Arabic encoding has
been set in stone for almost a decade now, and the Unicode consortium isn't
taking modifications for almost anything once standardized.