Re: Submitted papers

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at bamdad dot org>]

On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Chahine M. Hamila wrote:

> Yes, the issue has been discussed with other people using other
> Semitic based language. For non Hebrew users, the problem is not
> really important since 1) what is done on Arabization benefits
> every Arabic-based language

not necesserily, bidi proposal as a counter-example ;-).

> 2) non Hebrew and non Arabic scripts are so little used for now
> that any work done is what will actually define how things will
> work.

not true, but not annoying too much because we (in Iran) have decided
to just use unicode and other *standards*.

> Now, with Hebrew users, the some feedback we got wasn't very
> enthusiastic about the idea indeed. The main disagreement is about
> Hebrew users wanting to stick to the already defined standards
> (which isn't a bad thing in itself),

and also persian guys, maybe all other non arabs :-).

> and the Arabeyes people who are more into making one minor change
> to the bidi standard which would allow us to benefit from
> thousands of programs in a raw without a single line of code added
> to the existing programs and without any overhead or addition of
> complexity.

is this true? would you please first contribute us a sample/reference
implementation of your bidi alg.? an example of thos thousands of
programs...??? about a year later, I started to develop my own bidi
algorithm, the ideas were great in mind, but when I started to
implement..., it was impossible, Unicode's UAX#9 is a masterpiece as a
bidi algorithm, just run your algorithm (not welldefined in paper) on
unicode's test datas, and send us your output.

> If we still keep parting direction, we will indeed have two
> different bidi algorithms. IMHO, even though it would be better to
> have one only algorithm, it's not that important, as the algorithm
> would just be language dependent.

ok, you can use your own bidi alg. with your charsets/codepages, but
don't think about using more that one bidi alg. with unicode text.

> and the pros of getting all these thousands of existing programs
> at once is more important that the cons of having two bidi algos
> or being slightly different from what the unicode consortium has
> defined.

:-O.

> David Starner wrote:
>
> > From: "Mohammed Elzubeir" <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org
> > > I have submitted earlier today two papers to the Linux Arabization
> > > Workshop, which are available on the main page. They are both
> > > available in html and pdf format for your reading and
> > > printing pleasures ;)
> >
> > I'm curious about the bidirectional article. Has anyone talked to
> > people who use a non-Arabic RTL language about the ideas? That is,
> > other languages (Persian, etc.) using the Arabic script, Hebrew,
> > Syriac, and Dhivehi (uses the Thanna script)? Hebrew users are
> > the other big RTL users, both commericially and active in the
> > Open Source world - if Hebrew users chose  another bidirectional system,
> > you could easily get to the point where half the systems use one bidi
> > sytem and half the other, messing with any attempt  at reliable RTL/bidi
> > use.

no one can get to that point, because I believe the main unicode
arabic script users will be for persian, because no iso8859 encoding
supports persian well, and we stick ourselves to use unicode,
currently we have lots of text encoded in unicode in our projects, ...

-- 
Behdad
27 Mordad 1380, 2001 Aug 18

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