Re: [I18n]bdftruncate again ;)

[Moe Elzubeir]

I think you may want to elaborate on your statement about the Unicode Arabic glyphs being a short-term solution. It seems quite adequate to me. It's a shame on who? Obviously XFree86 is not going to the effort of implementing such a display engine for Arabic or any other scripted language to my knowledge. Shame on people concerned with Arabization? And for what? For X? for the console? As far as we are concerned at Arabeyes, the only stand-alone application we have (that is not in support for another application) with such a rendering engine is Akka (for the linux console).. and yes, it does consider all those languages (even the exitnct Syriac).   It seems that this "Unicode is not a good glyph encoding" gets echoed over and over.. and going through most of the posts, I don't know where anyone has suggested they were? We have gotten over that since we learnt of Unicode ;) Who else needs to get over that?   Actually, if you really want to look at internationalization, if you can claim that something works for Arabic.. you can pretty much claim it can work for any other language (almost). So, that's our new symptom, "if it works for Arabic, it must be international" ;) >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/25/02 09:55AM >>> RP> But isn't it a suitable glyph encoding for Arabic? Only to a certain extent. With its presentation forms for Arabic, Unicode provides a fixed glyph set for Arabic.  While this glyph set is suitable for some simple styles of Arabic typography, there is enough variation in typographical traditions to make the use of Unicode Arabic glyphs a short-term solution. (While it is true that the same could be said of Latin typography, with Latin ligatures are not used for on-screen display (or at least most of us find their use incomfortable).) Furthermore, I think it is a shame to go to the effort of implementing an Arabic display engine and not make it support related scripts (Syriac being the obvious example) which may not have encoded presentation forms. Folks, get over it: Unicode is not a good glyph encoding.  The fact that we're using it as such is a symptom of what is wrong with Unix internationalisation.  (``If it works for English and Japanese, it must be international.) —- Mohammed Elzubeir