RE: GNOME Translation in Uighur [ug]: Thank you

["Abdurixit Abduxukur" <ABDUXUKUR ABDURIXIT T-SYSTEMS CH>]

Thank you very much for your help to pointing me in the right direction. Now I am able to write in Uighur Arabic script under Linux.


-----Original Message-----
From: gnome-i18n-bounces gnome org [mailto:gnome-i18n-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Pablo Saratxaga
Sent: Montag, 14. März 2005 17:13
To: gnome-i18n gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME Translation in Uighur [ug]: Help needed

Kaixo!

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 08:33:18AM +0100, Abdurixit Abduxukur wrote:

> >key <AD02> { [ 0x10006cb ] };
> 
> But in this way I can resolve only one of the four different presentation
> forms.

No.
In Unicode you don't type "presentation forms", you only type letters.
Then each letter is rendered in the proper presentation form or ligature
form, depending on the context; the rendering is the work of pango,
and it does it quite well (provided the font has all the needed
presentation forms of course).

> In this specific example of "ve" I have two different presentation forms,
> separate form (UFBDE)and last-joining form(UFBDF).

presentation forms are included in unicode only for historic purposes
and to allows loseless conversion back and forth with old encodings
that make such distinctions;
but such codes should never be used directly when creating a new text
directly in unicode, nor when converting to unicode and you intend it
to be kept in unicode.

In current real life those codepoints are only relevant for font makers;
a user should never had to do anything with them.

> My question is: how to implement this letter same like as, for example,
> "Arabic_beh"

But "Arabic_beh" and 0x10006cb are the same (well, they work the same,
they are of course different letters); it is just that the habit of
creating a meaningful textual alias for each and every possible code
a keyboard key can send has been dropped with the use of unicode.
Some (like "Arabic_beh" etc) are still used because they are already
defined (also, for historical reasons, the real numeric value behind
"Arabic_beh" is different, it is 0x5c8, but I think that you can also use
0x1000628 with exactly the same behaviour).

But the important thing to know is that for Arabic script, the
keyboard has to send just the "canonic" letters, those in the
unicode U+06xx range, and not any specific presentation form;
that's true for the whole arabic range, the letters used by
Arabic language proper as well as all the extra letters used
by other languages.

> so that I can resolve all the existing forms with one key
> and it changes from one form to the other according to the
> previous and next letter in the word as I type.  

that is done by the rending engine and depends also on the font (if
the font doesn't provide all the needed presentation forms, it won't
display correclty, the exact behaviour will depend on the rendering
engine, but it will be bad on most cases).

Just try it, open a text editor with good rendering support
(like "gedit" for example), choose an appropriate font,
and start typing.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
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