arabic ISO characters

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Salam all,

I'm getting pretty close to providing (as far as I can tell anyway) Arabic
support in emacs-21 similar to what hebrew now gets, my only problem now is
finding ISO-8859-6 bdf fonts and a means of writing something in that
environment.

You see I can use emacs' MULE fonts (pre-unicode) stuff which really doesn't
make any sense and ought to, as far as I'm concerned, not be pursued at all
(its a proprietary mapping that ought to be pretty much dead :-).  I think
I've figured out how emacs (through leim and quail) gives one the ability to
remap the keyboard to anything one chooses (for input support).  So now I'm
at the point where I want to be able to enter Arabic letters (in unicode)
and store them off for this remapping mechanism.  I would _really_ appreciate
help here (any clues on what I can use to enter ISO-8859-6 characters -- I'm
unable to complie akka and had problems with axterm on solaris; using windows
is a no go since its uses CP-1256)

So in their hebrew file they show the following for ISO-8859-8,

 ESC,HwESC(B

for one of their letters (note the escape sequences), I need a similar
method of getting all the Arabic characters mapped..

One other minor thing, which keyboard ought I follow -- what is the most
common keyboard out there (can someone send me a mapping of the English
letters to Arabic ones or a gif of the arabic keyboard).

Mind you there will not be any shaping in this at all -- it will simply
display Arabic characters (backwards no less - like how english is written).
The reason I think this is important - its simply to prove to the emacs guys
that they _MUST_ support Arabic and that there is a framework in place now, so
no excuses for them anymore and there are people out there capable of
deductive reasoning and inspection (hey, I told you all that I'm no programmer
:-)

 - Nadim