hi. i'm trying to get emacs to display "contextual forms" of Arabic
letters correctly [1]. "out of the box", the fink emacs didn't do the
right thing for me with any of the fonts i tried.
problems of this sort are known [2]. one suggestion on the net is to
make sure that libotf is installed (it is, by Fink, in my case), and
that m17n-{db,lib} are installed. i can't find those last two, though
they appear to have been, at one time, part of the fink distribution.
(and, i notice that emacs24 in fink is configured with
--without-m17n-flt.)
after, or during, a fair amount of flailing, i eventually downloaded
24.4.4 from gnu and built it with Fink's libotf and with m17n-{db,lib} i
had downloaded and built from the m17n site.
two'ish questions:
1. is anyone *not* having my problem? i.e., is there anyone using
Fink's emacs and has contextual forms in Arabic working? if so, how did
you build your Fink/emacs to get that nice state?
2. (in case it may be important) where have the m17n-{db,lib} gone?
cheers, Greg Minshall
----
[1] letters in the Arabic alphabet, like those in the Hebrew and some
(unknown, to me) number of other alphabets, vary in shape depending on
whether they are printed separate of any word, or at the beginning, at
the middle, or at the end of a word (where, for ease of explanation, the
word "word" is here used slightly incorrectly). see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script_in_Unicode#Contextual_forms
if you would like more information.
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23924306/arabic-glyphs-in-emacs
is a discussion on stackoverflow. to really understand (and reproduce)
the problem, you might look at
----
http://www.persoarabic.org/content/generated/doc.free/mohsen/PLPC/120036/current/accessPage
----
and search for "Hala,". type that in to "M-x set-input-method
farsi-transliterate-banan" (as it were); if the right-most 4 letters
look as they do in that document, you are working. if, instead, they
look *something* like "IJIz" -- i.e., each letter separated from the
others by a space -- then you've the same problem i have.
one complicating feature of this problem is that it can be caused by the
"font" itself (fonts are apparently not such passive creatures as i
would have thought). even after getting things working with emacs, only
the "open type" fonts did the "right thing" (not the fonts which were
only "true type"; this was the cause of a substantial amount of my
flailing).
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