Pango status, arabic support

[Karl Koehler <koehlerk xmailer informatik uni-bonn de>]

First of all , I did not have much time to check for the 
last few weeks, so I was really impressed about the progress .
Some Notes :
* Speed is much better than before and mostly usable !
  
The following are my notes on testtext:
* page Up/Down is still awfully slow, and it continues
  after the release of the pageup/down-Key.
  This is annoying; if it is not possible to improove speed,
  one should catch the keyup-event and just stop 
  scrolling :)
* one can move the cursor vertically out of the
  frame (!) -- best seen when a big block of
  arabic text is at the bottom of the frame.
* after entering an arabic character afer a space 
  when in left-to-right-mode,   shaping is not done directly. 
  This is not good, because it means that you can't see what 
  you are typing unless the font happens to contain characters in
  the positions 0x60C .. 0x66A  ( This is not the case for
  any mulefont or the langbox-font ).
  Anyway, the shaper is called when typing in case
  the cursor _is already in between_  arabic letters.
  In right-to-left mode, everything seems ok .
* Sometimes a scrollbar is introduced even in wrap-mode.

A Question: How can I enter the zero-width joiner ?
That is, what is the keysym for this or how would I use
an input translation method to get it entered ?

Last, but not least, I ( hopefully ) improved the arabic module
( user visible: supress one unwanted join, mainly ).
It is , again, available at
  http://titan.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~koehlerk/u

It was asked on this list if it is possible to write arabic
"under gnome". If one is willing to compile gtk+ with pango-support,
it will work. 
I have not gotten any feed-back of the sort 
  "the shaper produces something strange in situation X",
so I might assume it is more-than-less ok :)

best regards,
		Karl