Re: [I18n]bdftruncate again ;)

[Moe Elzubeir]

I think there is a misunderstanding here. I am differntiating between the actual glyphs and the glyph encodings. The Unicode glyph encodings are completely irrelevant and are of no use to us. What I understood from you is that the actual set of glyphs are a short-term solution, which is not true in the case of Arabic. I don't know how it can be 'open-ended'. Arabic requires a certain set of glyphs to be able to render words properly, that is a fixed number of glyphs. How they are encoded, is again, irrelvant.   It is understood that the core font system is both inadequate for i18n and quickly becoming obsolete. The use of the core font system as far as I am concerned is limited to applications such as xterm, and other miscellaneous applications which expect/require fixed-width fonts. Any other kind of application, say, a Word-processor or a web browser, would make use of TrueType fonts.   Backward-compatibilty is the reason we would like to have the Arabic fonts available on the core font collection. It is by no means intended to be what all future applications will depend on. That would be a gross mistake, seeing how limited their use is.   We have asked for no features, as far as I recall. Our requests have been quite reasonable, although perhaps misunderstood. In any case, Markus has agreed to take a subset of the ISO10646-1, and that is what I will do. If that too is unacceptable, then..<shrug>.. I don't know what else to do? I have asked on several occasions what an alternative solution would be, and the answer was often to use libraries that aren't even stable yet.   In fact, I am now even more confused ;) So please bare with me and explain to me, if you may. There are core fonts, and there is a core font system. Then there is the Xft library interface. My question is, what fonts does the Xft use? Where does it get them from?   Thank you. Mohammed Elzubeir   >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/31/02 09:37AM >>> ME> I think you may want to elaborate on your statement about the Unicode ME> Arabic glyphs being a short-term solution. In my opinion, any solution that is intimately wedded to a single glyph encoding is a short term solution. The set of possible ligatures and contextual forms in Arabic is open-ended.  While it may very well be that the set of Arabic glyphs encoded in Unicode is sufficient for your immediate needs (and perhaps it is, who am I to know?), there is a significant chance that this will no longer be the case in the future. Thus, I would like to encourage you to consider a solution that uses dynamically generated glyph encodings rather than using Unicode as a fixed glyph encoding.  The former is not (easily) doable with core fonts, whence my suggestion to avoid them. The other reason I would like to encourage you not to use core fonts is that the core fonts system is obsolete.  I do believe that we have already pushed it to its limits.  If you do use the core fonts system, you will request more features, something that we will have no choice but to refuse, leading to further pleasant conversations such as this one. ME> It seems that this "Unicode is not a good glyph encoding" gets ME> echoed over and over. The set of possible glyphs for any single language (even English) is open-ended.  Thus, unless I've missed something, there is no such thing as a ``good'' glyph encoding for text (as opposed to dingbats). Regards,                                         Juliusz Chroboczek _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n