Hi all, for rendering PDF containing both Arabic text and SVG containing arabic text, I recently experimented with different fonts.
Except for the Tahoma font (which I'd rather not use for its license restrictions), Arabic text is rendered without ligatures, i.e. the letters of words are displayed as if they were written alone, while Arabic demands they be rendered differently inside of words and at the beginning and end of words, so they apper connected like hand-written text. That even though most fonts I tried seem to work perfectly well with PNG transcoding (when registered with the GraphicsEnvironment beforehand), generating Arabic text as expected. The fonts I tried so far are Lateef, Scheherazade and (Wikipedia-used) Amiri. Amiri (Regular) contains almost all characters of the unicode character sets Arabic, Arabic Supplement, Arabic Presentation Forms A and Arabic Presentation Forms B. As far as I know, ArabicTextHandler tries to replace adjacent letters with the respective connected forms and annotates the characters (not: code points, alas) with the respective in-word-position information for the letter, and it is called in both PNG transcoding and SVG-in-PDF transcoding. However, PNG looks much better in all cases, the ligatures seem to work only there. Is this a known issue? If not, I will gladly provide more information and test resources. Regards, Robert
