Re: arabic ISO characters

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

 >The point is, I've created a very cool (I hope:)) Arabic font for the
 >text console that has position independant shapes. It is delivered with Akka,
 >and should exempt anyone working on Arabization for the moment from taking
 >care of the contextual formatting.

You see, this I don't understand -- I don't think what you describe
is very portable in the sense that no one will be able to comprehend what you
might write using Akka unless they have those same fonts (which if you came
up with them -- is very unlikely).  In other words, I would think that the
more generalized a font is, the better since that would note that other people
using whatever other tools and as long as the bytes are stored in a particular
manner (your Bidi spec. :-) they would be able to share documents.  Now, from
what I gather Arabic portability is a mess.  Emacs has their own fonts,
Akka is using its own, whatever else is out there (Langbox) is using its own,
etc, etc (non of which can talk to each other)..  Personally, I would much
rather have an editor that supported ONLY two fonts (ISO-6 and windows-1256).
I'm not saying that having one's own fonts are bad, on the contrary, I think
its cool, but its paramount that the tool _must_ support standard fonts.
You see this is like using Notepad on Winblows and then wanting to paste
into an xterm (whoa, what they hell are all these characters).  Alas, am I
off the mark here ?  I also agree with your Bidi spec. since it attempts to
lump every different implementation into ONE standard method (non of this
visual/logical crap :-)

 >> 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 :-).

 >100% correct.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get anything but the Mule-fonts working which
leads me to believe that the ISO-6 is simply not implemented or not implemented
correctly, but the problem here is how do I make sure.  If I cut and paste an
ISO-6 string from say langbox, emacs still doesn't recognize it even though
I've installed the appropriate fonts.

 >> 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

 >what's the problem?

I figured it out with lots of trial-n-error (an engineer's best tool) and also
cut-n-paste.  I've found all the arabic keyboard mappings noted so as to
create a leim/quail arabic.el

 >The only thing is, I don't see the details of what you want to do, because
 >I've never used any other input than Latin one on xemacs. Don't worry about
 >going technical, I know the basics of elisp programming and have a ratherd
 >etailed idea on how to remap keys on (x)emacs.

He he..  I don't use Xemacs and the one installed here does _not_ have mule
installed.  Alas, in emacs (let me know if you have a copy handy) you can
tell it to use a specific language (C-x RET l, then type "korean"), you will
see on the mode-line a "K" noting that its your language mode, if you will.
If you then C-\, your keyboard turns into a korean mapped keyboard (note
korean character on mode-line).  Having also looked at how korean is handled
(hangul.el), I don't think it would be difficult to add shaping to emacs for
Arabic (shaping here means the "seen" will look different depending on where
it lands in the word).  The one thing that would be left would be the
Right-to-Left (R2L) thing which is way beyond me (I think Mohammed was going
in that direction :-)

Alas, I've hacked various files so that Arabic will function in the same
manner that hebrew is currently working.  Its no where to being usable
(that's way beyond me), but now you get the letter "einn - as in abas :-)"
and you can type Arabic letters (no shaping yet).  I decided to map the
keys according to the first keyboard listed on,

  http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/keyboards/arabic.html

In other words, I used microsoft's mapping of the keyboard - for now that
is good enough and I think we also need to make a push to standardize on this
as well (well, microsoft might do it for us :-)

 >> 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).
 >
 >Following the aunyxish bidi paper, it's not really a problem;)
 >The thing would be to find out a way to
 >1) mirror a buffer display
 >2) make the block cursor mode (make it the akka way? i.e. insert + backward
 >movement every keystroke? dirty but trivial)
 >3) Create the automatic input BC switch (this part should be the trickiest
 >imho).

Well, at this point (and especially with elisp !!) its beyond me.
Baby steps, baby steps...

As noted I think I have what I set out to do.  My only thing now is that I,
unfortunately, don't have any ISO-6 working -- I'm thinking I could post the
stuff on comp.emacs and see what they say (I was also planning on plugging
our effort there - ie. www.aunyx.org (or whatever new name) which I'm sure
will become a point of future contact).

If you guys don't have emacs-21 (its not released yet), download it from

 people.debian.org/~kitame/emacs21

if you decide to do that, I can mail ya'all a patch of what I've done thus far
for you to critique/modify/enhance, etc -- maybe, inshalla, we'd get ISO-6
working..

 - Nadim