Re: Mirroring in Unicode
Hi Behdad, On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 05:34:42 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes this has been the rule for a few years, but everyone is so scared about auto-inserting marks and later dealing with them, without cluttering the text much. One such implementation is KDE's parantheses fixing idea based on keyboard layout which is considered quite a failure (read on Arabeyes wiki page for Qt bugs). I finally figured out that if I insert either an RLE or an LRE character right before each open parenthesis and a PDF character right after each close parenthesis then all parenthesis are matched and also their nesting level is preserved as well. Is this something guranteed, or is that I could not find a bad example where this breaks? Also, is this the KDE's parenthesis fixing idea you are refering to above? -- ODC ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaat e Farsi
On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:14:40 +0430, Hooman Mehr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: More clarifications, questions and opinions: 1) Clarification: Are we talking English or Persian? a) The English name of the concept in the locale document is Arabic Script and it is not up to us to discuss or change it. It is already decided and used a long time ago. (So Connie don't worry, it won't create the kind of confusion you feared) b) We can only put a Persian phrase we standardize for referring to that concept in our own locale spec. c) The phrase does not need to be a literal translation of Arabic Script 2) Observation/Retreat: Nationalistic considerations. I confess that I underestimated nationalist feelings that the word Arabic carries among Iranians. So, I change my stance and think that we have to avoid anything that can hurt people's feelings. Assuming the heated reaction we saw here is an indication of the possible general public reaction, I vote against using arabi to name the family of scripts that our script belongs to. 3) Question: Khatt-e Farsi overload issue Issue: If we use Khatt-e Farsi for the family of scripts and again Khatt-e Farsi for Persian variant of it, the two will not be distinguished. [1] Question: Are you comfortable with this overload of concepts? Should we ignore this issue? I personally do not mind using the same term for these two concepts. 4) Call for fresh ideas: a) Is there any idea besides Khatt-e Farsi and Khatt-e Naskh [2]? b) Does anybody know of a phrase that better matches the concept at hand? c) Can't we come up with a word other than Khatt to call this concept of a script family? I noticed that an old Persian word for Script is 'dabeere' spelled dal be ye r ye heh We can use that as well to call Arabic script, 'dabeere ye faarsee',. I am personally inclined towards a new and unfamiliar (but sounding familiar) term without using the word Khatt. - Hooman Mehr Endnotes: [1] For the information of people quoting constitution, what is called Khatt-e Farsi is the second concept (Persian variant of the Arabic Script) not the first one. As far as I am aware, there is no official name for the general family of scripts that encompasses ours. [2] I still oppose Khatt-e Naskh for the following reasons: 1) As a script name, it is used in the context of evolution of writing systems not present day distinction among script families. 2) It is confused with calligraphic style with the same name. The name is well known to ordinary people as calligraphic style but never heard by general public as script name. So, the chance of confusion is initially almost 100%. 3) The key: I am personally inclined towards a new and unfamiliar term. Because the concept is not truly familiar for normal people. Khatt-e Naskh is too familiar in a different context, I don't like using it for an unfamiliar concept. You may not find my reasons compelling but I am not trying to convince anybody, I am just saying why I am not still convinced and probably will never be because the third and the key part is mostly a matter of preference and not logic. ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft
On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 21:03, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: They all call it Latin Script (khatte laatin), right? BTW, while khatte laatin is OK, khatte laatini is preferred. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaate farsi
On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 21:46, Peyman wrote: The attached .jpg is a text from the book pishineye zabane farsi written by Dr. Safavi. The text speaks about styles, not scripts. In other words, the text you forwarded is one level lower in the tree. In other words, the Arabic script may be written in different styles, Kufi, Naskhi, Suls, Nastaliq, ... The Persian that Dr Safavi specifies is in that classification. PS: Sorry if the jpg quality is not good because the list doesn't accept files bigger than 40KB You can put them somewhere on the web and send a URL for files larger than 40KB. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaat e Farsi
On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 10:26, Hooman Mehr wrote: If we don't like the Arabic word, we may substitute something like Islamic and call it Islamic Script. I don't mean to give it any religious weight, but just substituting the physical origin (Arabia) by culture that carried along this script into our country and a lot of other countries and caused a single writing system to become a family of closely related writing systems. Well, usually the script is religion-based. Currently, Latin usually means christian or secular, Cyrillic means communist, Arabic means Muslim, Hebrew means Jewish, ... But sorry, we don't want to invent anything here. I suggest Roozbeh ask more expert (linguist) opinion to see if they have a Persian term for the above concept -- at least within their professional linguist circles. Already done. They prefer to call this the Arabic script, to differentiate it with writing the language in the Latin script, for example. BTW, experts don't necessary mean linguists here. There are also the adibs, which sometimes have different opinions. Some of the adibs may prefer khatt-e faarsi, I'm sure. This confusion among some potential audience of the document also indicates that you may need to add a footnote to explain the meaning of Arabic Script as intended in the locale document. Thanks to the finding of Ali Khanban, we will put that footnote, also referring to the text of the constitution and clarifying the context. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Mirroring in Unicode
On Jun 12, 2004, at 4:14 PM, Behnam wrote: I had discussion with an Apple developer on this subject. She insisted that this is the way Unicode wants the mirroring characters to behave and that Apple has no intention to change its implementation of them. There has been a misunderstanding in your conversation and in a sense both of you are right. As I develop this topic further you'll better understand it. I hope she would read my posts (if she has any influence on Apple) so that something would get fixed on Apple's side as well. On the other hand, what she needs to realize (along with most of the other developers) is: Unicode does not have to dictate the user interface of text input and editing. The user interface of text editing can be vastly improved if we properly design a GUI-optimized model to hide the true underlying Unicode bidi semantics in favor of easier and more user friendly semantics while maintaining 100% Unicode compatibility. On the other hand, I suspect you have font related issues. read below... This whole thing means that on Mac platform we will see the wrong parenthesis on Persian web-pages forever! Part of the issue you are experiencing could be related to fonts. Persian/Arabic Apple fonts need a suitable character property table to identify mirrored glyphs and behave correctly. Please compare the behavior of Geeza Pro standard system font with the fonts you are using. If they are different it is becuase of the missing or improperly formed 'prop' table in the font. (http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6prop.html) If this is the case let me know to see how I can help fix them. I guess that along the effort in finding a proper solution for handling of mirroring characters, there has to be an effort to remove this useless mirroring effect in Unicode altogether. Don't even think about that. In the text stream level using logical opening and closing parenthesis instead of visual left and right parenthesis is actually very helpful in keeping the logical text processing model simple and elegant. Also, too many things already depend on it. We need to address this issue in text input/editing services of the operating system without touching Unicode. As I mentioned Unicode is not at fault here. The current assumption that the Unicode model necessarily applies to the user interface is the problem. - Hooman Mehr ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Farsi vs Persian (Re: khaat e Farsi)
On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 12:32, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Don't know why, but it reminds me of the Persian vs. Farsi problem... BTW, I just got my hand on the proceedings of The First Workshop on Persian Language and Computer, which took place on May 25 and 26 in the Faculty of Literature and Humanities of Tehran University. Most of the articles contain the word faarsi in the Persian title, and not a single one of the 58 refers to it as Farsi in the English title. They all call it Persian. This is good news. Almost no one is *that* ignorant. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
OT: GNOME/GNU (was Re: Mirroring in Unicode)
our target system (GNOME/GNU/Linux) GNOME is a GNU project, of course. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaat e Farsi
On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 20:31, C Bobroff wrote: I believe Roozbeh, while typing the document was attempting to translate Perso-Arabic script into Persian. Not an easy job. No, I was translating Arabic script into Persian. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Mirroring in Unicode
On 12-Jun-04, at 8:50 AM, Hooman Mehr wrote: On the other hand, I suspect you have font related issues. read below... This whole thing means that on Mac platform we will see the wrong parenthesis on Persian web-pages forever! Part of the issue you are experiencing could be related to fonts. Persian/Arabic Apple fonts need a suitable character property table to identify mirrored glyphs and behave correctly. Please compare the behavior of Geeza Pro standard system font with the fonts you are using. If they are different it is because of the missing or improperly formed 'prop' table in the font. (http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6prop.html) If this is the case let me know to see how I can help fix them. I do all my tests with Geeza Pro and ISIRI keyboard does produce the opposite of intended parenthesis with Geeza Pro. Apple Persian keyboard produces the intended one because as I said it is mapped in the opposite way. My other fonts behave similarly which, I suppose, is good news! Behnam P/S I'm very interested to present this discussion to Apple developer and I'm working on it. ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaat e Farsi
On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 09:01, Peyman wrote: Conclusion: You can say that the origin of our alphabet is Arabic but you can not claim that our writing system is Arabic. Our writing system is Persian khaat e farsi. It is what my teacher Dr. Safavi as a linguist says in his book and what I also say as a linguist. Well, I wish to emphasize that our writing system should be described as Arabic in certain contexts, like when used in internationalized computer systems. Since you are a linguist, I wish to refer you to a linguistic text, Daniels and Bright's The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0195079930. Please read Section 50, Arabic Writing. Dr Bateni proposed a minor change to our writing system long ago in order to better serve the Persian language; and they ignored him and fired him from the Tehran university because of political and religious red lines. Please provide details. Linguistic details, at least. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Mirroring in Unicode
Hi, I checked it and can confirm that Apple's ISIRI 2901 keyboard has a bug in this regard. The Persian opening parenthesis in ISIRI 2901 is located on shit-0 and closing parenthesis on shift-9, but Apple's implementation have them reversed. This is a minor issue. The keyboard file is an XML file that can be easily edited with sys. admin. privileges. I think someone already posted information on a fixed and enhanced Persian Mac OS X keyboard on the list. - Hooman Mehr On Jun 12, 2004, at 6:12 PM, Behnam wrote: On 12-Jun-04, at 8:50 AM, Hooman Mehr wrote: On the other hand, I suspect you have font related issues. read below... This whole thing means that on Mac platform we will see the wrong parenthesis on Persian web-pages forever! Part of the issue you are experiencing could be related to fonts. Persian/Arabic Apple fonts need a suitable character property table to identify mirrored glyphs and behave correctly. Please compare the behavior of Geeza Pro standard system font with the fonts you are using. If they are different it is because of the missing or improperly formed 'prop' table in the font. (http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6prop.html) If this is the case let me know to see how I can help fix them. I do all my tests with Geeza Pro and ISIRI keyboard does produce the opposite of intended parenthesis with Geeza Pro. Apple Persian keyboard produces the intended one because as I said it is mapped in the opposite way. My other fonts behave similarly which, I suppose, is good news! Behnam P/S I'm very interested to present this discussion to Apple developer and I'm working on it. ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: khaat e Farsi
On Sat, 2004-06-12 at 19:04, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: Since you are a linguist, I wish to refer you to a linguistic text, Daniels and Bright's The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0195079930. Please read Section 50, Arabic Writing. ... and section 62, Adaptation of Arabic Script. roozbeh ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Mirroring in Unicode
Short of missing something on the list, that would be me providing alternatives to Apple standard keyboards. But they are not fix of existing standards. In fact, they are not standard at all! But you are right. This is a minor issue and can be fixed. I can do it for Mac community but I rather ask Apple to do it in its original issue. My concern is more to do with different approaches in dealing with mirroring characters. The point being, it doesn't seem to be the way mirroring characters are mapped on MS keyboards. And most of the web-pages are typed by MS keyboards. Am I on the right track? Behnam On 12-Jun-04, at 10:54 AM, Hooman Mehr wrote: Hi, I checked it and can confirm that Apple's ISIRI 2901 keyboard has a bug in this regard. The Persian opening parenthesis in ISIRI 2901 is located on shit-0 and closing parenthesis on shift-9, but Apple's implementation have them reversed. This is a minor issue. The keyboard file is an XML file that can be easily edited with sys. admin. privileges. I think someone already posted information on a fixed and enhanced Persian Mac OS X keyboard on the list. - Hooman Mehr ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft
On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: Many other things may also be optional (like how to write ordibehesht, zi-hajje, or hejdah), but we are only allowing one, There is no comparison between these and the personal name topic. You are giving incomplete and wrong information. And you have every right to do so too so don't let me stop you. However, now that I've pointed it out, I know that even though I'm not going to say another word on this topic, you'll fix it. How do I know? I've come to know your ways very well after so many years. You'll see. all the time. Sorry! Then you need to define all the time. I don't see a Kasra in the author's name on this book that is sitting on my desk. Well, all the time does not, in fact, mean all the time in English. It just means all the time. You know, a synonym for sometimes! Why do you have to always be so hard on the poor molla from Qazvin? -Connie ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft
On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: Arabic? For example Pashto or Ordu? Yes, all those script are called Arabic in scientific circles. No, the others are, in scientific circles said to be in Perso-Arabic script. You can also say a modified form of the Arabic script but that is what is meant by Perso-Arabic script. Just Arabic script only applies to the Arabic language. Your Persian-knowing readers of the draft will know what you mean if you just say khatt-e `arabi however, I recommend you put Perso-Arabic script (in English) or modified Arabic script so that if the draft gets translated into some other language, the people less familiar with Persian will understand and that will make its way back into the translation. -Connie ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Personal names survey
Hi Connie, To be honest, I have NEVER seen anyone put Kasre in personal names. I just tried all books in my small shelf and NONE of them had kasre on the cover page. Note that all of these books have been bought in the past year in Tehran (Enghelaab). Here is the list of names I checked for curious: Nasim Daavari AbooToraab Khosravi NikAahang Kowsar Seyyed Ebraahim Nabavi (3) Jey Di Salinjer (8) Ahmad Golshiri Hooshang Golshiri (6) Mostafaa Mastoor (4) Mishel Foko Maani Haghighi M. Aazaad va Said Tavakkoli Asadollaah Amraaii Reymond Kaarver (4) Farzaane Taaheri Ja'far Modarres Saadeghi Shirin Ta'aavoni (Khaaleghi) Meelaad Zakariaa (:D) Mohammad Najafi Itaalo Kaalvino (3) Mohsen Ebraahim Seyyed Mohammad Ali Jamalzaadeh Kort Vone-gaat Joyner Eyn. Alef. Bahraami Negaar Saadeghi Ali Abdollaahi Hermaan Hese Keykaavos Jahaandaari Haaynrish Bol (3) Naataali Choobineh Ahmad Shamlou (5) Fedriko Gaarsiaa Lorkaa Abdolkarim Soroush (2) Iniaatsio Siloneh (2) Mehdi Sahaabi (2) Mohammad Ghaazi Simon Dobovaar Roman Gaari Soroush Habibi Tooraj Rahnamaa Farzaad Hemmati MohammadRezaa Farzaad Feredrish Vilhelm Niche Dariush Ashouri Abbaas Ma'roufi Zoyaa Pirzaad (2) Simin Daaneshvar Bozorg Alavi GholaamHossein Saa'edi Saadegh Hedaayat (2) Noam Chaamski Koorosh Safavi Ahmad Kasravi MohammadRezaa Baateni MohammadRezaa Mohammadi-Far (9) Aandri Taarkofski Hooshang Hesaami YaarAli PoorMoghaddam (5) ... So, here it is. Do you still say all the time? If you still insist on that, I'm afraid your opinion should not be counted, because apparently it's not the practice in Tehran. behdad On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, C Bobroff wrote: On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: Many other things may also be optional (like how to write ordibehesht, zi-hajje, or hejdah), but we are only allowing one, There is no comparison between these and the personal name topic. You are giving incomplete and wrong information. And you have every right to do so too so don't let me stop you. However, now that I've pointed it out, I know that even though I'm not going to say another word on this topic, you'll fix it. How do I know? I've come to know your ways very well after so many years. You'll see. all the time. Sorry! Then you need to define all the time. I don't see a Kasra in the author's name on this book that is sitting on my desk. Well, all the time does not, in fact, mean all the time in English. It just means all the time. You know, a synonym for sometimes! Why do you have to always be so hard on the poor molla from Qazvin? -Connie ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing --behdad behdad.org ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
Re: Mirroring in Mac OS X (was Mirroring in Unicode)
Dear Behnam, No, this is another story. The sad news is that there are multiple implementations of Unicode in Mac OS X. WebKit (The engine of Safari) has its own Unicode/Bidi engine. Cocoa has its own Unicode with no native Bidi with some ugly Carbon ATSUI patches bolted on and some ICU thrown in to get limited Bidi. Carbon uses an incomplete and degraded implementation of ATSUI which is a downgraded and crippled version of QuickDraw GX layout engine of system 7 days. That is not all. I really hope Apple will start to clean up this extremely ugly mess, otherwise they will be forced out of bidi markets for good. It is amazing how much worse their bidi text engine is compared to 12 years ago. The problem is that each of these have their own bugs. Sometimes the bugs are a result of the same thing being applied twice because of API layering. This is the case with Safari. In some combinations of style sheet and page tags it tends to mirror a glyph twice which will result-in no mirroring which is wrong. Actually the workaround in such case is to use a buggy font which does not have a 'prop' table (like a PC font) and then it will work because it would not be mirrored by the normal mechanism and just WebKit's extra mirroring would create the correct result. I really hope someone at an influential Apple position would listen to me It really frustrates me to see Apple (who once was a pioneer in bidi and was one of the key founders of Unicode) in its current sad position in bidi support. The problems are deep rooted and want a real effort and will in high management positions to solve. - Hooman Mehr On Jun 12, 2004, at 7:51 PM, Behnam wrote: Short of missing something on the list, that would be me providing alternatives to Apple standard keyboards. But they are not fix of existing standards. In fact, they are not standard at all! But you are right. This is a minor issue and can be fixed. I can do it for Mac community but I rather ask Apple to do it in its original issue. My concern is more to do with different approaches in dealing with mirroring characters. The point being, it doesn't seem to be the way mirroring characters are mapped on MS keyboards. And most of the web-pages are typed by MS keyboards. Am I on the right track? Behnam On 12-Jun-04, at 10:54 AM, Hooman Mehr wrote: Hi, I checked it and can confirm that Apple's ISIRI 2901 keyboard has a bug in this regard. The Persian opening parenthesis in ISIRI 2901 is located on shit-0 and closing parenthesis on shift-9, but Apple's implementation have them reversed. This is a minor issue. The keyboard file is an XML file that can be easily edited with sys. admin. privileges. I think someone already posted information on a fixed and enhanced Persian Mac OS X keyboard on the list. - Hooman Mehr ___ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
