Re: kacst meeting results

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

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

Thank you Munzir as we really need better communication with all like-minded
working groups out there for better/faster results.

> 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]

OK, then we'll CC the gentlemen noted.  It would be ideal if both
Mr. AlKanhal and Mr. AlRajhi subscribed to 'general' as many topics
(esp. of late) are of direct interest.

> 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.

Great - one thing that was not mentioned is we are in need of someone
with proper skills (ie. Mr. AlRajhi :-) to look over our 'Khotot' project
to, more specifically, look over the salvaged fonts.

  http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Khotot

I personally have a number of questions which I'd like to get answered
(as I have minimal experience (if you even want to call it that :-) with
fonts).

> 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.

I have a non-complete list of things from Mohammed.Yusif with regards to
the missing glyphs.  I will ping him on a finalized list and get back to
this topic (else I'll simply mail off the document I'm holding).  What
he'd noted (so far) are all legit glyphs that are needed indeed.

> 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.

Well, it would have been nice to see an Arabic site that talks about the
algorithm instead of being referred to a latin book for details ;-)  It
might be a good idea to start collecting and publishing such algorithms
in a single location for others to benefit from.

> 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.

We got wind of this idea via Mr. Al-Twaijry (as he was kind enough to let
us know).  We officially replied here,

  http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/general/2004/January/msg00086.html  

As for a single account - I don't think we'd go that way; individual
accounts per user is more the norm (a detail we'll work out later).

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

I pinged Mr. Al-Twaijry about this as well and he restarted looking into
it, we'll inshalla hear something from him soon (Ahmad, don't be shy :-).

> 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.

To be fully honest, I don't remember it (Elzubeir ?) but then again we
do tend to get _lots_ of things -- we'd certainly had made it public if
we did though.

Salam and thanks for all your continued help !!

 - Nadim


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