Re: Quranic Proposal - Rendering engines implementing Unicode

["Thomas Milo" <t dot milo at chello dot nl>]

> Sorry again Tom for paraphrasing for you. Please
> confirm whether I represented what you tried to say
> properly.

Mete,

You paraphrase is correct with one caveat: the rendering engines are not the
problem. The modern rendering engine is built for dynamic fonts (a concept
pioneered by DecoType). As a result the combination of Unicode and dynamic
fonts is a generic solution, that can be made to work in most cases.

If the industry does not bother to implement Unicode, it is usually in the
Fonts Domain. For unskilled end-users, that is frustrating. But I understand
this group has the competence and the will do improve Arabic computing, so
you need tools to adjust or build the necessary dynamic fonts.

Being an OS community I suspect you want them for free as well. OK, OpenType
(http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.html) is the closest thing to Open
Source. From MS you can obtain lots of guidance and even tools to develop or
adjust your own fonts:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx.

The least you should expect from the hosting operating systems that you are
putting your cards on is that they support the concept of cross-platform
font technology like OpenType. DecoType is also developing ACE into a
Unicode-based cross-platform function.

For the end-user it should be irrelevant whether his Unicode text is
rendered by ATSUI, OT, Graphite or ACE. Therefore it is of the utmost
importance that the encoded characters of the Unicode standard are of
universal, plain text relevance and not proposed to address an ad hoc
problem of a particular font on a particular platform.

t