Re: Pango status, arabic support [and urdu]

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 01:22:25AM -0400, Shahbaz Chaudhary wrote:

> 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).

Yes please, if you have information on that tell us (currently I know 
absolutely nothing about what Urdu support would require)

> 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...)?

What is "nastalique urdu" ?

> 
> Shahbaz Chaudhary
> 


> 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.

Oops; it was late and I wrote errors!
peh, tcheh and gaf are there on mulearabic.

Whay is missing are the keheh (for initial and medial the shape is the same
as for kaf; but for final and isolate they definitely are different),
the iranian yeh (although alef maqsura could be used, same shape), and
the shape for digits. 
 
> 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

the question however remains.
with also the possibility to add to that mulearabic-3 other arabic letters
used by Urdu; and maybe also add (mulearabic-4 ?) all the diacritic signs
and more complex ligatures.


-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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