Re: New version of arabic font

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

On Monday 08 December 2003 09:42, Yousef AL-Harthi wrote:
> Hello
>
> Now we release new version of fonts contain new font ( Farsi font) and
> contain some development in other fonts.

Wow! I am really happy you have done!

> We develop Quran font (KacstQr) 

I can see some improvements: The size is Ok now even bigger than traditional 
arabic which is good.

> as you suggest,  

Have you included the missing character Muhammad Yousif pointed out. I tried 
to look them up through KCharSelect but couldn't find them. Afterall, this is 
why we call for another release.

> we named it new name (KacstQurn) .
Do we really need to spare the 'a' from 'Quran'?

You have also put another font KacstQura (besides KacstQurn) on the package 
which has nothing to do with the name (Qura) and nothing to do with beauty ;)

Kacstqurafixed is missing many characters in the Arabic Presentations Forms-B 
to the extent that the font is not usable for anything at all!

> You can use the sign between verse by click SHIFT + 8 .

SHIFT+8 should give an asterisk not the sign between verses. It's a unicode 
standard besides this will cause strange behavior when the font is used as a 
standard font in any distro (like the case in Mandrake 9.2). Example, when 
one types a password, he will see this sign accumulated over itself to give a 
very strange shape!! I need some one else to comment on this issue before 
considering it a bug.

Kacstfarsi doesn't look as beautiful as Urdu Nastaliq Unicode font I spoke 
about before but it's much better in terms of completeness. If you can only 
patch Urdu Nastaliq Unicode to include the missing glyphs it would be very 
usable in many applications.

> You can download new version of arabic fonts from this site :
> http://ceri.kacst.edu.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts-1.5.tar.gz

Your .tar.gz file extracts to a temp folder. This should be changed to extract 
to a KacstArabicFonts folder. It's also much better to compress to .tar.bz2 
(453,361B)  than .tar.gz (655,123B).

Just:
tar cvjf KacstArabicFonts-1.5.tar.bz2 KacstArabicFonts-1.5
is enough to do the two tricks.

I am sorry if I seem rude but I am speaking to the KACST with all its good 
reputation not anyone else. So, bear with me and let's see a 1.6 release 
within two weeks.

-- 
Munzir Taha
PGP Key available:
gpg --recv-keys --keyserver www.mandrakesecure.net F0671821

Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Linux Registered User #279362 at http://counter.li.org
Mandrake Club member
Maintainer of Mandrake Arabization Project Status (MAPS)
http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/distro/mdkarabicsupport.html
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS
New Horizons CLC
Riyadh, SA