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Re: Arabic on emacs



Yes, the guy is right: Emacs displays Hebrew wrong. Actually,
context-dependent shaping is not necessary in order to read (or write)
Arabic because when using the right fonts you can have a pretty much
position independent glyph (see Akka). So any soft that can display
Hebrew (or any other semitic based script) is okay for Arabic too.
Bidi should be completely eliminated when it comes to display and memory
too, it should only be kept at the input level. So wheras the different
scientific publications you can find on ACM for example that deal about
Bidi input are right, the Unicode consortium specification is badly
brain damaged. So all one needs in Emacs is to mirror characters for
a first step and you'll have Arabic display (you can leave Bidi input
for later, it's less of a problem when you realize that the Unicode
consortium is completely missing the point).

We've been through this on the arabhackers forum, I guess you will
probably find the relevant discussions in the arabhackers archives, or
better yet I'll write up a doc about this...

Salam,
Chahine