Re: Is X lam-alef key OK?; technical detail

[Mohammed Sameer <msameer at foolab dot org>]

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On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 10:44:18PM +0900, pflm52td at w6 dot dion dot ne dot jp wrote:
> So, several years ago, one (member of Arabeyes ?) decided to put 
> lam-alef in the pr. block B to the key "b", conforming to the habit
> of Arabic typewriters (or MS Arabic Windows? I'm Japanese, not sure.)

I had such a problem with iconv complaining about "illegal input byte sequence"
I had an interresting story here: http://www.foolab.org/node/91
Isam did this hack AFAIK.

> It's an ad hoc workaround hack. When katoob receives it, it decomposes
> INTERNALLY into separate letters lam and alef, and stores so in the file.
> Katoob re-synthesizes them into combined lam-alef, and displays it.
> (By the way, I'm often admired by the beautiful scripts correctly put
> together by katoob. Fonts lateef and scheherazade provided by SIL
> www.sil.org are excelent.)

huh ? I didn't understand the last part, Thanks for your words ;-)


> But mozilla / firefox, which Arabeyes members seem to take part in,
> was originally written mainly by non-Arabs. They are only Unicode-aware,
> not of the above workaround. For example, when I type in firefox-1.0.6
> (the latest of the stable release), "as-salaam", seen and lam-alef 
> do not appear combined. 

I don't use this key so I've never nticed.
Katoob is using pango internally and pango is able to handle the presentation form,
I guess mozilla didn't take this into account, That's why it's not handled correctly.
Well, I can't blame it because it's a hack.
Well, This should be fixed but I don't know how. I'm not familiar at all with mozilla code.


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