Re: Request for comments on Square Arabic

[YChaddad at maktoob dot com (Yasser Chaddad)]

Dear all:

The idea of having a problem free digital set of characters is very nice. But
please allow me to make the following observation: if the only purpose for using
Square Arabic or similar fonts is to avoid reshaping or whatever other problems, I
think that it would not be a legitimate one. In fact, things as I see them, with
the eyes of a non-specialist, are that the effort to devise a reshaping system for
Arabic characters would be done only once and used forever (please correct me if I
am wrong). If so, and If the guys at Redmond could solve that problem, I think
that the Open Source community should be able to do it too. We do want to have
less problems in processing Arabic, but we do not want to give more reasons to the
end-users to stick with MS products by using fonts that do not satisfy their
expectations. Linux products should be at least as good (specially in terms of
display and printing, which are the most common uses of computers in the Arab
World) as that of MS ones.

However, should these fonts solve computational problems for the Arabic
community, and should they interfere in no way with the reshaping and other
requirements of the other fonts, I think that adding them as a further option
would be a very good idea.

We need to take sure steps forward even if it takes us longer, specially when
we deal with a kind of work that is done once and for all.

Keep the good work!

Yasser Chaddad

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