Re: arabic ISO characters

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 02:29:08PM -0700, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> 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.

There are a few differences between Arabic and Hebrew. In Arabic, there are
several glyphs per character and a ligature. So, without the extra processing
between glyph and character, it wouldn't be a feasible solution.

>
> 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 asinine 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 :-)
>

As you know, I am no Emacs expert. But, hopefully someone else might jump in.

--
Mohammed Elzubeir

Arabeyes.org - Arabic Unix Project
http://www.arabeyes.org/
Unix, the 'right' way