Re: Why Arabic Shaping?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

On Mon, 27 Aug 2001 14:46:28 +0200
 Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> David Starner wrote:
> >
> > Speaking in Unix X font terms, a *-iso8859-6 font has at most
> > 256 glyphs, numbered 0-255, that are generally expected to
> > correspond to the code points of ISO-8859-6. A font standard
> > that would treat an *-iso8859-6 font differently could be
> > accepted, but is probably pointless; what do you gain over a full
> > *-iso10646-1 font with the same capabilies?

Sounds like we'll need to move towards iso10464 instead of iso8859
due to these short-comings.

> Personally, I think that it could be feasible and useful to have a
> standard repertoire of glyphs and a standard set of rules for a
> *minimal* readability of all Unicode "complex scripts".

I agree wholeheartedly.

> The main risk of standardizing a "minimal rendering" is that all
> digital applications may limit themselves to that simplified form,
> thus blocking all the investments and research for reaching
> typographical excellence.  That would have the disastrous effect
> that the digital era will kill all sorts of beautiful things such
> as the exquisite Pakistani typography.

Irrespective of the argument you pose above - I think we both agree
on the value of having a "standardized" means which dictates where
glyphs reside (ie. their encoding and address space).  I'd be happy
with just that for now :-)

> So, I'd rather go for a simplified and *standard* display,
> considering two things:

Agreed !!

> As I said, there is *no* standard way to fit these things together.

How do we proceed then ?  With the myriad of fonts out there (none of
their glyph encodings match one another), can we at least come up with
a non-intrusive encoding for the glyphs (so that it doesn't interfere
with any other inclusions) informally and live with it for the time
being with unicode's nod (note the word __informally__) ?  We then
could start modifying the fonts we've collected and spread/preach the
informal word.

> The nearest thing to a standard minimal set of Arabic glyphs is
> Unicode Arabic extensions A and B. The rules to map the logical
> characters to glyphs is explained in the Unicode book and summarized
> in:
>
>      http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ArabicShaping.txt
>

Yah - I had started this thread posing their inclusion - the fact that
they are termed "optional" irked me as well (please check arabeyes.org
'general' archives).

 - Nadim


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