Re: Pango status, arabic support

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 10:12:55PM +0200, Karl Koehler wrote:

> 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

The mulearabic-* fonts provide really very nice output (btw, I've added
support for mulearabic-{0,1,2} to X-TT font server some time ago; it is nice
as it allows to use TTF fonts to have good quality rendering).

There is however a problem: those fonts can't be used to rendr Farsi (Iranian)
as they lack a few letters (4 forms of peh, tcheh, gaf, keheh 
and the iranian yeh; plus Farsi uses the digits 0x06f0-0x06f9 and not
the 0x0660-0x0669 ones.

So my question is, would it be interesting to create a *-muelarabic-3 with
those missing chars; or instead use a completely new font encoding 
for exemple the one used by TTF fonts done by IRNA (they have only arabic
letters; no latin ones; an example is attached (note: doesn't trust the [ ]
they appear on different places in each font; other glyphs are constant
however. the lower half has the punctuation and isolated and initial forms;
the higher half the final and medial forms. The tawteel is at 0x9e.
Note also that there are some redundancies: ain and ghain have all the 4 forms
duplicated in low and high halfs; and heh has initial and medial forms in
both halfs too)).
 
-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975

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