kacst meeting results

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

Salaamu Alaikum

Today, I met Dr. Mohammed Alkanhal and Mr. Naif Alrajhi (Font designer) at 
kacst Computer and Electronics Research Institute. The meeting is fruitful 
and gave me good impression about the future of our collaboration together.

In no particular order:

Transparency:
I told them about Arabeyes.org complain regarding a 
single contact point. lack of visibility into their roadmap (announce 
packages once done).
[The response is: alkanhal (at) kacst.edu.sa, nalrajhi(at)kacst.edu.sa]

Fonts:
I discussed many fonts issues with them. Mr. Naif promised to solve them all 
in their comming version which would contain more fonts and some 
improvements. I discussed the missing Quranic glyphs, the asterisk, fonts 
naming, hinting, spacing, harakat, slanting, thickness, styles, rounding, 
gaps, word spacing, nongnu.org/freefonts, Urdu Nastaliq Unicode, .... I think 
it will turned out that the whole font need to be redrawn to look better.

Unicode:
Regarding pushing Unicode to adopt the missing glyphs, they said they will be 
happy to make the proposal official as much as they can in case it's written 
by arabeyes.org. So, please, let's begin this. Some one with some experience 
need to write a proposal and they will support him.

Umm al-quora algorithm:
May be this issue has already been resolved from the last mail about the 
subject (a book mentioned, I think). But if there is still remaining issues 
they are willing to help. They mentioned Mr. Alharithi many times regarding 
some issues but I think he is busy and now abroad. Also, Mr. Altwaijri is 
mentioned.

QuranComplex:
They contacted it officially now and are waiting for their response. Let's 
see. In case of No, I suggested to contact QuranDVD.com per Ossama suggestion 
to see what can be done.

Payable translators:
It will be discussed and I will be happy to train them how to use cvs. and we 
can offer an account with the name kacst and password ***** ;) for them to 
begin with.

Contacting Harf, and others:
To see the possibility of porting some of their apps to linux. It will be 
discussed again.

Super .LUG using RSS:
Some one need to contact .sa LUG and see what have been done.

Financial matters:
I stressed the point of supporting developers to devote some time for 
programming so the output come faster and more professional. To begin with, I 
suggested they pay Muhammad Alkarouri to finish Bicon in a specified time. He 
can be contacted via malkarouri (at) yahoo.co.uk
mobile: 004477899342404
karouri is already working on it but can't afford enough time since he is 
looking for work and study in UK now. He is professional enough to be trusted 
if he has time.

Are we ready to convert?
They handle me a report regarding Evaluation of Office packages in linux. They 
said they forwarded a copy to Arabeyes before. It seemed as if I had missed 
this report. It's prepared by Yousuf Alharithi and others under the 
supervision of Dr. alkanhal and Prof. fayz. It's very nice since it points 
out some bugs that I am sure have not been reported as bugs before.
Now, what happened to the bugs page. It's very essential to have it NOW so we 
can know what's missing and make priorities.

-- 
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/distros/mdkarabicsupport-en/
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS
New Horizons CLC
Riyadh, SA