RE: Pango status, arabic support [and urdu]

["Shahbaz Chaudhary" <chaudhar engin umich edu>]

If some farsi characters are not included, then a number of urdu ones must
also be missing.  I haven't looked very closely but there only seem to be
some amaturish efforts at making a complete urdu font (which doesn't
necessarily include Sindhi, Pashto, etc.)  If someone wants, I can try to
find a list of urdu fonts that may be used in an open-source system
(although, due to some recent initiatives the Pakistani government will be
directly supporting a standardized font).

Also, someone once mentioned that Pango, once completed, will not be able to
handel nastalique urdu font.  Is that true (perhaps some background on
that...)?

Shahbaz Chaudhary

-----Original Message-----
From: gtk-i18n-list-admin@gnome.org
[mailto:gtk-i18n-list-admin@gnome.org]On Behalf Of Pablo Saratxaga
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2000 9:14 PM
To: gtk-i18n-list@redhat.com
Subject: Re: Pango status, arabic support


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