--- Mikhael Goikhman wrote:
> On 18 Dec 2002 18:57:32 -0800, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> > iso8859-6 is a subset of iso10646-1 -- again, iso8859-6 alone is
> > simply not usable; its visually incorrect without shaping and one
> > is not able to shape sans Form-B glyphs (there are a plethora of
> > posts regarding this topic on the 'net - I can certainly send you
> > the links if you like so as not to go on a tangent on this forum).
>
> I know the theory well now. But you miss my point. I want everything to
> work, including iso8859-6. You can't deny that there is such charset (and
> encoding) and as you said it is not losing for Arabic. So if a user
> requested iso8859-6 fonts (without non iso8859-6 characters, of course)
> he don't want to see question marks for valid iso8859-6 characters.
I won't argue with that - but in all honesty I don't think anyone will
do that unless its for shear testing/curiosity.
> Don't worry about this, I may later fix one-byte Arabic charsets myself.
> Or not fix, if you are against supporting all existing Arabic fonts. :)
I'm not against it and in theory you are correct - it should work as
well so that fvwm doesn't deviate from "normality". I'm a bit biased
as a great deal of us on arabeyes.org have been advocating UTF-8/ISO10646
since its solves so many of our problems; do go ahead and fix it, it
shan't affect the proper shaping doing in utf-8.
> > > We supported all iso encodings. I see no valid reason to stop to support
> > > iso8859-6. I think the problem is that once shaping is applied fribidi
> > > (or is it iconv?) can't go back to iso8859-6 and uses question marks
> > > then, so we should only apply shaping for unicode encoding of original
> > > strings.
> >
> > I don't think its a question of support. Fvwm is doing the right
> > thing. I view this as "faulty/missing font" issue. The font file
> > you were using simply doesn't have the _required_ Form-B glyphs and
> > thus Arabic can't be displayed properly. Its like wanting to display
> > chinese without having the correct chinese glyphs and getting question
> > marks instead.
>
> What you say is that all existing CP1256 and iso8859-6 one byte fonts
> should show question marks and never Arabic glyphs that they contain.
> I don't know, it is not hard to fix this situation.
And fixed it should be (I'm recanting my stance in favor of "theoretical
correctness" :-)
> By the way, FVWM supports CP-1256 encoding without problems, as far as
> I can see, when I set CP-1256 encoded title using:
>
> env LANG=ar_JO.iso8859-6 date | iconv -f iso8859-6 -t cp1256
Again theoretically - cool :-) but I sure would not advocate anyone to
use M$'s encodings.
> I even see it correctly shaped (I think) if I use unicode font like:
>
> Style Arabic Font StringEncoding=CP1256:*-arabeyes-*/iso10646-1
So the above is saying take my strings (which are CP1256) and convert
them to UTF-8 (since iso10646-1 is noted) and use the noted font to
display them, right ? If so it makes total sense - the man page should
note that 'StringEncoding' acts as the '-from' for 'iconv'.
> > I can understand the following encodings
> > UTF-8, USC-2, USC-4 and UTF-16, but don't quite understand a setting
> > akin to 'StringEncoding=iso8859-6' (unless fvwm is mapping names to
> > encodings which is what I thought it did - "convenience magic").
>
> If you have text stored in some encoding (iso8859-6 or cp1256), you may
> find it useful to be able to convert it to something else, like utf-8
> to use with unicode fonts. FVWM allows this using StringEncoding.
OK, cool - then what I note above ("acts as the '-from'") is correct.
> Out of curiosity, do you have Arabic text files? Are they all in one or
> another unicode encoding? I read literature in several languages, but I
> should yet encounter utf-8 text. If there are one byte encodings and there
> is only one language (except for English) unicode is a waste of space. :)
Everything that I have is in UTF-8 (diskspace/memory is cheap); I'd
rather be consistent and correct :-) If you'd like some Arabic UTF-8
samples, let me know.
> Of course, to see one byte encoded text, you should replace "set
> encoding=utf-8" in your .vimrc that I know you have.
:-) and the various emacs settings,
(setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
Thanks & Regards,
- Nadim (Thanks for CC'ing)
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