Re: Mandrake's issues (was - distro project...)

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Thanks Munzir for the great update on Mandrake's issues.  A couple of
suggestions and some inline remarks below.

Do please try to make it clear what you'd like the group at large to
do next time.  In other words, possibly section off your emails into,

 a. please do this
 b. background
 c. details

I think you'd get better response that way.

--- Munzir <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa> wrote:

You might want to include your lastname on your email as there is another
Munzir helping us out now :-)

> Please, take some minutes out of your precious time to vote for these
> bugs and see how you can help.

OK, I had my spam-accepting alter-ego vote already included :-)

I've voted for the following (others, please do the same - it takes 2
minutes -- this is the least you can do),

  http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5181

Bug 5181 is crucial !!!

I also voted for,

  http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5184

> Pablo wrote:
> > I'm still in search of a freely distributable font covering all the
> > arabic letters (or at least those used by Arabic and Farsi, as 
> > translations for those); or someone able to do the needed changes
> > with pfaedit to one of the GPL'ed fonts available.
>
> me> I don't know but a free Arabic font is already there in the distro.
> 
> Pablo wrote:
> > Yes, but for Arabic only. It doesn't have the supplementary glyphs
> > needed for other languages like Farsi and Urdu (for Farsi particularly
> > it is a big penalty; as it has a very good translation level, but no
> > suitable font...).
> 
> > The Arabic fonts are under GPL, so anyone with font knowledge could
> > add the missing glyphs (most of them are easy as they are just
> > variations in number of points over/under base letters, only 3-4 letters
> > need specific drawing); but I can't do it myself, as I don't know enough
> > about scalable font editing. 
> 
> me> If there is something wrong with the fonts encoding please explain and
> me> we will do our best to correct it if possible.
> 
> > well if more glyphs could be added it would be perfect.
> > In the www.unicode.org there are good tables showing the presentation
> > forms of the various chars.
> 
> > Particularly interesting and easy (no new form, just dots, strokes or
> > a small tah (which glyph is already present) are:
> > U0679, U067E, U0686, U0688, U0691, U0698, U06A9, U06AF, U06C7
> > digits U06F0-U06F9 (only 4,5,6 differ from standard arabic ones)
> > those need a bit more design: U06BA, U06CC, U06D2, U06D5
> > with those 23 extra characters it would cover also Farsi and Urdu.

I think its more than the 23 characters Pablo mentions - you need to
account for their variations as well (in presentation Form-A, I'm
guessing).  In other words, look for the above glyph encodings in,

   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0600.pdf
   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFB50.pdf

What is required here is someone that is aware of the requirements
that is able to read/modify/write font files - or at a min someone
that can mail me the appropriate glyphs to include (all of them).
The Khotot project has all its files on CVS, so it should be
painless to do this given working examples out there to look at.

Any Farsi/Urdu knowledge on the list ?

Do all please vote on mandrake for the above mentioned bugs.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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