Re: arabic character not properly connected together

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 23:15, Hazila Awang wrote:
> Dear all,
> I have problems in displaying arabic characters (not conencted together
> "wasal") when displaying it on my application developed using gtk2.0. I
> am using :
> 1. English Linux (RedHat 9)
> 2. Gtk2.0
> 3. Pango 1.0
> 4  Fonts : Sans
> 
> I have run testtext -> example and the arabic characters are not
> connected as well.

The most likely problem is that a font is being used that doesn't have
proper Arabic tables. RH 9 doesn't include any good Arabic fonts, so
you'll get a random font that might include Arabic characters, but
doesn't really work in Arabic.

If you install Arabic fonts (I've put one package that should work
at http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/tmp/arabic-fonts/) and point
fontconfig at them:

Create a ~/.fonts (or system-wide /etc/fonts/local.conf) with contents
along the lines of:

<fontconfig>
        <alias>
                <family>sans-serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>KacstBook</family>
                </prefer>
        </alias>
</fontconfig>

I suspect things should work better.

Regards,
                                              Owen