Re: Numeric shaping in Pango

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh sharif edu>]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 18:13, Lina Kemmel wrote:
> "...information from other paragraphs in a document could be used to
> conclude
> that the document was fundamentally Arabic, and that EN should generally be
> converted to AN."

That is of course "very bad" for stability of text unless the algorithm
is carefully specified.

> "Remap the number shapes to match those of another set.
> For example, remap the Arabic number shapes to have the same appearance as
> the European numbers." [or vice versa of course]

Same here. How is one to determine which of the shapes to use? For
example, consider a document talking about different digits in different
writing systems. Do you want it to be displayed in different ways on
different desktops?

Anyway, those lines are there to be used by higher level "protocols".
Where are those? Or are you suggesting a new protocol to be defined in
gtk?

> That's what should happen in the ideal world. In the real world, AFAIK
> these characters are absent in most keyboard layouts (except maybe IBM
> ones),
> and I don't expect them to be widely used in the absence of a simple way to
> input them.

There is some other problem: There are a lot of cases more than one set
of digits is used in a document. For example, a certain document I am
now writing in Persian, uses European digits to refer to different
versions of the Unicode standard or certain pieces of software developed
outside Iran, while it uses Extended Arabic-Indic digits for everything
else. In a system with automatic digit shape replacement, I'd be in
hell.

roozbeh