Re: [farsiweb] New Membet

[C Bobroff]

Hello everyone,
I've just been informed that my friend Saber has told you all
about my project. He did this with the best of intentions but without
my knowledge. Believe me, I did not want to get you people who
are working so hard on font development and unicode problems to
be bothered with my small project (which has nothing to do with
standardization of anything), but now that he has I'd better
explain because all of you who responded with complaints are right
to have done so! (Especially about the passwd!)

Anyhow, my project which I started 6 months ago is to make a web-based
language learning tool for foreigners to learn Persian. Basically
there will be a short story written in a nice, clear Persian font, with
an option that the lines of the text will expand and a .jpg of each
line will appear underneath the line in font which will be a scanned
image of the line above only in regular, everyday handwriting of
various people. Almost all the words will have an  html tag
whereby a yellow box with the word's English translation will appear
if you let your mouse hover. Each line of the text will be numbered
and if you click on the number a new window will appear with "footnotes"
for the vocabulary/grammar/cultural notes of things which occur
in that line. There will also be a sound file with a native speaker
reading the text.

While a lot of you who are in Iran may think this is all very easy, guess
again! My target users can not be expected to have Flash and all the
latest Microsoft software which is so easily available in Iran. Even
to make them download a Persian font will be a problem. Also there
is a sizeable population trying to avoid all Microsoft products so I
need to make my site viewable on various browsers and computers.
Keeping it simple appears to be very hard!

It took me so many months just to find out how to type a simple document
in Persian. Now the remaining tasks are looking harder and harder, that's
why my friend Saber suggested he enlist the help of various "farsi"
related Yahoo group members. After initial enthusiasm, no one has
stepped forward to help, either with computer related problems nor
with Persian language help. I think that's why he's now bothered all
of you. I had no intention of sending out a global call for help! Just
thought it would be a few of us, that's why I had to put the password.
(After almost going mad trying to seek information on how to type
a Word doc in Persian, I thought I'd better share that info and so
posted a Persian Word FAQ on my webpage but I didn't really want those
users looking at all my project docs which are under construction. Hence
the password.)

If you've read all this and still are interested, you can take
a look:
http://students.washington.edu/irina/
Click on "Yek Ruz"
The logon and password are both "fred".

That would be great if someone with computer skills could volunteer
to work on any specific task.

Warning: the site is a mess, truly under contstruction. Anyhow, you'll
get an idea of what we're doing.

Thanks for your time and interest if you read this,

-Connie (and Saber)

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[farsiweb] weft

[C Bobroff]

Have any of you managed to use WEFT with Persian fonts? This seems
like a good solution [i.e. concealing!} the final "yeh" with dots &
the "heh + yeh" looking like ta marbuta problems which you get
with the core fonts (like Tahoma, Times New Roman, etc.)

WEFT 3 is available at:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/default.htm?fname=%20&fsize=

I was able to at least get it working with the KoodakBold font (one of
the few fonts without "embedding disabled" but it only seems
to work in certain conditions.

If anyone else has tried this, please share your experiences!
Thanks,
Connie

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[farsiweb] weft

[C Bobroff]

Thanks to Arash and Omid for your responses. I would love to get
this working...

> dependent, not because it is too complicated, but because the font
> doesn't allow embeding.
I also think so and although Weft tells you whether embedding is
"permissible" for each font on your webpage, it doesn't state
if the vendor of the font has disabled embedding intentionally
or just inadvertantly caused it. I see that some fonts simply
don't embed at all, while others (Nazanin) embed but end up
looking different than normal while others  (Koodak) do work ok.

In any case, I have written to the developer and I'll post any
info I get in case others are interested.
Besides Weft, I've also discovered another commercial product
which is advertised as being better than Weft:
http://fairy.em2-solutions.com/main.html


> But is the WEFT way really necessary today? Or is it because of the
> different shapes that you need to use WEFT?
Well, the target users of my webpage will be people who don't have
any Persian fonts on their computer and can not/will not install one so
they will end up seeing my page in (some version of)Times New Roman.
Besides
the not-as-nice appearance of TimesNR, the character "heh + yeh"
seems to come out as "ta marbuta".

In case anyone doesn't know, there is also a way to embed fonts in Word
docs (Word2002 and some earlier versions): Tools-->options-->save-->embed
true type fonts. This is a convenient way to check if fonts are embeddable
without having to use Weft which takes a little more time/trouble.



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[farsiweb] weft

[C Bobroff]

>  or if the feature is
> disabled in the font how could we enable it) please
> inform us, to make the needed changes.

Here is what the Weft developer told me to tell those of you
who are making fonts:

"They need to set the font's 'fstype' value, which is located in the
font's OS2 table. You can forward them a pointer to the OpenType spec at
www.microsoft.com/typography/specs/ if you like."

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if you need to know
anything else. Maybe I can find out.
By the way, please tell me which are the Sina fontsI have been
wondering.
-Connie

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[farsiweb] NESF font

[C Bobroff]

> Just wait for our new set of 'standard' fonts, with embedded bitmaps,
> which will start with Terrific (FarsiWeb's Traffic).

Sounds terrific :)

I don't know how elaborate a font you are making but if feasible, it would
be so nice if you could include in your font all the Perso-Arabic subsets
of the Arial MS Unicode including the roman characters used for
transliteration such as macron above & below, dot below, etc.

Even if it's necessary to use "alt" and "ctrl" to accomodate all the
characters, that's a lot better than having to mix and match various
fonts just to write a simple sentence!

Thanks,
appreciate all your effots,
Connie

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Re: [farsiweb] NESF font

[C Bobroff]

> We lack the resources for hinting and drawing bitmaps for all of those.
> But we would love any contribution. Just wait for the fonts to be
> released.

Thanks Roozbeh. I didn't mean to sound (too) greedy and impatient!

I just wanted to make sure you know there really is a need for some of
the rarer characters.  Remember when I  was asking some time ago about
the "heh +yeh" as one character? Well, I got a lot of personal emails
about that and people were actually trying to tell me that that character
is no longer used in the modern writing system! Now if folks think that
about the "heh +yeh", then what is the fate of something like the
"superscript alif" and others?! I think these characters shouldn't
be doomed to extinction in the age of computers, right?!

Now if you need resources, you have to be specific because I'm sure there
are a lot of people out there in net land that would love to help you but
don't know how.  Like, if you need money, tell them where to send their
checks, if you need software, say what it is, if you need technical info,
state the problem and someone can get the help from one of the many very
helpful forums out there. (But don't ask me for any of these! I'm not
computer savvy and am a poor student and all you folks that send me your
resumes and so forth every time I post a simple computing question to this
group, beware, I can't give you a job and am in fact extremely poor!)

One other thing occured to me. THere are already a lot of Persian fonts
out there. Is there any way you can contact the people who have made
them and just modify them rather than start from scratch?  I know this
may not be practical, just a thought from someone who has no clue
about font-making

Again, thanks for all your hard work,
-Connie

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[farsiweb]heh + yeh

[C Bobroff]

Hi,
Correct, historically it was a small "yeh" above the "heh" which
gradually started looking more like a "hamzeh". This 2-in-1
character evolved out of the needs of the Persian "ezafe" construction.
(Arabic does have something called an idafa construction but it
is entirely different. Therefore this character applies not to Arabic
but to Persian and other languages like Urdu which have borrowed from
Persian.)

I think the use fell out of fashion only in recent modern times in certain
mass media publications such as children's textbooks and newspapers since
in pre-wordprocessing days, it was easier to simplify things.  (I don't
read either of those so I may be wrong.) However, if you open any work of
literature written in Persian, even in the last year, you will find loads
of "heh + yeh"'s on every page.

(Hey, this is fun! I feel like I'm helping save the dolphins from
extinction or something!)

-Connie


> --__--__--
>
> Message: 1
> From: "Abi Lover" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 15:29:48 +
> Subject: [farsiweb](no subject)
>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> RE: The 
>final draft of "Persian Information Interchange and Display Method, Based on Unicode" 
>
>  
> 
> I have just 
>read the text of the final draft of this standard, and the only thing that I disagree 
>with is the omission of the "heh" with "hamzeh" above from the standard. This shape 
>is used quite a lot in Farsi, and I can't understand the reason for its omission. 
>This letter form is not any different from "vav" with "hamzeh" above, or "alef" with 
>"hamzeh" above, and I can't understand why these glyphs should be allowed, but "heh" 
>with "hamzeh" above should be disallowed, especially since a Unicode number (06C0) 
>has also been designated for it. It is not correct to say that this letter form only 
>applies to Arabic or Urdu. It is used as much in Farsi as in other languages. 
> 
> 
> Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: 
>Click Here
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 16:48:10 +0100
> From: Ali Khanban <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Abi Lover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [farsiweb](no subject)
>
>
> --050706040508070608050201
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> Dear Abi,
>
> It seems to me that "Alef" with "hamza" above or "vav" with "hamza"
> above are one letter (different shapes of "hamza"), but "heh" with
> "hamza" above is different. It is not "hamza", but a deformation of
> "yeh". It is a combination of "heh" and "yeh" which was written as two
> letters in the past, as is written again as two letters recently. So it
> is better to write them as two characters, in my opinion.
>
> Best
> -khanban-
>
> Abi Lover wrote:
>
> > RE: The final draft of "Persian Information Interchange and Display
> > Method, Based on Unicode"
> >
> > I have just read the text of the final draft of this standard, and the
> > only thing that I disagree with is the omission of the "heh" with
> > "hamzeh" above from the standard. This shape is used quite a lot in
> > Farsi, and I can't understand the reason for its omission. This letter
> > form is not any different from "vav" with "hamzeh" above, or "alef"
> > with "hamzeh" above, and I can't understand why these glyphs should be
> > allowed, but "heh" with "hamzeh" above should be disallowed,
> > especially since a Unicode number (06C0) has also been designated for
> > it. It is not correct to say that this letter form only applies to
> > Arabic or Urdu. It is used as much in Farsi as in other languages.
> >
> > 
> > Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: Click Here
> > 
> > ___ FarsiWeb mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
>
>
> --
> 
>
> ||   Ali Asghar Khanban
> || ||Research Associate in Department of Computing
> |||  Imperial College of Sci, Tech & Med, London SW7 2BZ, UK
> ||   Tel +44 (20) 7594 8241   Fax: +1 (509) 694 0599
> |||  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~khanban
> 
>
>
>
> --050706040508070608050201
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> 
> 
> 
>   
>   
> 
> 
> Dear Abi,
> 
> It seems to me that "Alef" with "hamza" above or "vav" with "hamza" above
> are one letter (different shapes of "hamza"), but "heh" with "hamza" above
> is different. It is not "hamza", but a deformation of "yeh". It is a combination
> of "heh" and "yeh" which was written as two letters in the past, as is written
> again as two letters recently. So it is better to write them as two characters,
> in my opinion.
> 
> Best
> -khanban-
> 
> Ab

[farsiweb]Farsi, heh, +, hamzeh, above

[C Bobroff]

> >  The
> > purpose of such standards should not be to tell people how to write
> > Farsi. People decide how to write Farsi. The standard should encode
> > and standardize what people write.

Exactly! Is it not crazy that word processors are being made to *emulate*
old-fashioned typewriters which, because it was not practical for
typewriters to include all the beautiful variety of characters that the
human hand + pen + paper could do let certain characters fall out of use
in certain kinds of  mass-produced publications!  Now a generation has
grown up deprived of them.  And then they go and advise Microsoft and
Microsoft then dictates. (Look at the use of Western style numerals
on all Middle East websites if you really want to appreciate the problem.)

Now a plea to all you silent lurkers: It would be really nice if you could
drop  a line to Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?LN=EN-US

and tell them to include this character in the Times New Roman font.
We're talking about:
Arabic letter heh with yeh above, hex: 06C0, Dec: 1728

Times New Roman is the global default font yet it is lacking this
character. And if people are unable to download one of the many Persian
fonts that do have this letter, what is viewed is the letter "teh
marbuta".

There is no use having this unicode discussion if the default
browser font can't display the character, right?
And Microsoft only "notices" when bombarded with lots of complaints about
bugs.

Thanks,
Connie

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[farsiweb]heh + hamze

[C Bobroff]

>  In the English language, this
> glottal stop (or rather plosive) occurs only at the beginning of words which
> begin with a vowel, like {a,e,i,o,u}, therefore it is not represented by a
> separate character.
Check out a word like "butter":
Subcontinental pronunciation: battar
North American pronunciation: baDar
British pronunciation: ba'ar (could be written nicely with a hamze in the
middle! But luckily we've all agreed to write it as "butter".

On the other hand, "color" and "colour" and many more examples exist side
by side in the world.

Persian words also have more than one spelling per word. The makers of
searchable databases/dictionaries will just have to make sure to
include all the variants.

> because it can also occur in the middle and at the end of words, it needs to
> be represented by a special character of its own.
Persian, like English writing system is not phonetic. The point here is
not to develop a transliteration system for Persian or to discuss whether
the spelling of Persian words is logical (it's not!).
There is a relationship in Persian between "yeh" and "hamze".
Check out the way you pronounce these words first in slow speech, then
again in fast speech: (try not to think about the writing)
sAat "hour"
xAen "traitor"
taqAod "retirement"
moallem "teacher"
zaif "weak"
pambei "of cotton"

Now this group:
pAin "below"
Aine "mirror"
tanhAi "loneliness"
masnui "artificial"

And this group:
lAeq "worthy"
qAeb" absent
hqAeq "truths"

(I didn't make these up. THey're standard in this sort of discussion.)

Depending on  your dialect and whether you're saying them fast or slow,
you'll get different results, sometimes a /y/="yeh", or "/'/=glottal stop,
or just a brief pause. And there are even sub-categories of these three.


> used to represent a glottal stop (or plosive) at all, but by a centuries old
> convention it is used to represent the Farsi , when it follows the
> letter . That convention has served the language adequately for
> centuries, and one does not simply change a centuries old convention by an
> arbitrary decision.
Absolutely.  It is a done deal.

---
> the same in Farsi and Arabic. For example, in Farsi we use a shape
>  for  in  which would be a shape like 
> if we had used the Arabic style.
I think that (nicely) reflects that Persian has borrowed the word from
French and Arabic from English which have 2 completely different
pronunciations.

Well, I hope the silent lurkers are enjoying the digressions. Please
forgive but I'm extremely frustrated that I can't type certain
words that have existed in a certain writing system for so many hundreds
of years...
-Connie

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[farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

>  For example, the
> number {7} in the Farsi character set and in the Arabic character sets look
> identical in appearance, but have different code numbers assigned to them
> (i.e. 06F7 and 0667 respectively).
Is this true? This is hard to believe. I wonder why? Seems a bit
extravagant but then this is out of my league.


> We're listening, and reading all the debate. I will summarize all after
> all dust settles,
I can't wait! All this time I thought the debate was on whether this
character *exists* or not. I have not received any flames this time
telling me that it's no longer used so I guess that means this
discussion has served a useful purpose and we can move on to the
*implementation* stage?? Now it appears it is not clear if it is a
case of heh + a certain diacritic (hamzeh) or if heh + hamzeh is one
entity.

Well, in the latin subsets, one finds macrons, dots, accents etc both
alone and as part of various characters.  If someone needs to type an "e"
with a macron, they have a way to do so. If they want to type one by
itself, they have that option as well. I'm sure no one involved in
implementing these ever discussed the Roman origins of these diacritics so
what does Arabic phonology have to do here, especially if there is an
ARabic #7 and a Persian #7 and they're both one and the same?

And I repeat, if the default font Times New Roman lacks this most basic
character and the people who make that font are not Persian experts
and are relying on incorrect info to make their font, what are we
supposed to do? Gif and JPG everything? A font lacking one letter is the
same as having no font at all.

Are we working towards the day when we can for example, scan and OCR
a medieval Persian text  where Arabic and Persian words  appear
side by side and to which we can insert some remarks in the contemporary
Persian style as well and post on the internet?

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Re: Farsi

[C Bobroff]

> > faqih>. They have nothing to offer to the Persian IT and language discusion.
>
> Would you please be more explicit, and provide a list of names?
>
> roozbeh

Don't be mad at Abi. Be mad at the people who aren't mad that in this
day and age one can't type Persian properly. Get the list of
names of subscribers to this list and subtract 4 and there you'll
have the silent lurkers who are sitting back enjoying and thereby
with their silence are voting their consent.
-Connie

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[farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> Ok, it seems that we are seeing a lot of monolouges here.
I'm sure more people than just me are finding the monologues educational
however, Abi, please give Roozbeh the floor as we'd like to hear the
promised summary.
Roozbeh, can you please tell us about this "normalization" and why
the mention of "Persian" is to be removed from this character?

I'm lost!
Thanks,
-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> thing. He may look at the charts, and he will either choose U+06D5, or
>  (HEH, HAMZA ABOVE),
I guess you mean U+0654. In any case, neither
is acceptable. The hamzeh ends up really high above the heh depending on
the font.

> The first time I found this, I asked Unicode people for changing the
> decomposition for U+06C0. I then found that there is a stability policy
> about these, and that they have had their own reasons for selecting this
> decomposition. After that, I asked them to remove the mention of "Persian"
> from the comments for this character.
Well, I'm unable to understand all this and I guess I'm wasting your
time which was not my intention.

If you have any suggestion of how I can make a web page with the character
heh+hamzeh, please let me know. I can type it very nicely in any of the
usual Persian fonts (nazanin, roya, koodak, etc) but it comes out as teh
marbuta on a computer without these fonts installed and for which Times
New Roman is the default browser font. Of course, even if the
TNR font adds this character today, it will be years before everyone
has downloaded the updated version. (Not to mention how will I
type a teh marbuta if heh+hamzeh and teh marbuta are mutually exclusive?)


Unless you can give some other advice, I think I'll just have to
find a way to embed a font with this character on my webpage. Maybe
even this won't work. ???

Thanks,
Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> not specify anything about broken fonts, or fonts that are not suitable
> for some purpose or other.
I was checking it with Arial MS Unicode, Tahoma.


> solution, if it's non-stnadard. After all, Persian support is far from
> complete and stable in Windows and Internet Explorer.
Yes, I can only get it to work if these 2 conditions are met.
Well, I'm glad you say it's "far from complete". I would hate to
think Persian has to remove this one character from circulation just
because  at this moment in time, the technology is not up to
dealing with it. I hope some unemployed genius who has been alerted
to the problem following this discussion or later finds it in
the archives will figure it out!

> These fonts are more than non-standard. They use U+0629 for it, which
> belongs to TEH MARBUTA. No surprise with a more standard font you see it
> that way.
Hmm. I didn't know that.  How did this situation come to pass? I have
been wondering all this time since teh marbuta is also used in
Persian, why this could be when there are plenty of free keys available.
Who started this? Do you know anything of the history of these fonts.


> I don't know. You have a problem NOW, I was discussing the problem of
ok. Sorry if I misunderstood. It did appear to me that people involved
in the technical issues thought that this character is no longer used
therefore the solution was to get rid of it and the technical
challenges it poses. I hope you can see how I could have been led
to think this!

Thanks for generously responding,
Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> They needed to represent the shape in CP1256. They figured that TEH
> MARBUTA is similiar in joining behaviour, and replaced the glyphs in the
> fonts.
Thank you. I'm learning a lot here!

>  (If I were
> doing that in their time, I would have used DAMMATAN, drawing a HAMZA
> ABOVE as a replacement glyph.)

I'm sorry. You're dealing with a real blockhead here and I'm slow to
understand but could you please explain why they needed to *replace*
anything. Couldn't they have just *added* so we'd have dammatan, teh
marbuta AND heh+hamze.

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

>  So they could
> only replace an Arabic letter with a Persian one. So they replaced Arabic
> Kaf with Persian Kaf, Arabic Yeh with Farsi Yeh,

but we seem to have both Kaf and Gaf without problem.There they've
added, not replaced.

(I won't bring up the yeh.at least for now!)

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> I'm talking about Arabic Kaf (U+0643) vs Persian Kaf (U+06A9). Gaf was
> already there in CP1256.

Oh. They already had Gaf in the Arabic. I guess some Arabic dialects
do have that sound. Or did they include Gaf for the sake of Persian
and didn't get around to heh+hamze?

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> BTW, it was a shock for me to see Feh with three dots below and Qaf with
> three dots above in frequent use in Tunisia.

Yeah! I know! But I suppose that's better than no dots at all like they
used to have in early Arabic.

Now, one more question then enough of this shab zendeh-daari for you (it's
afternoon in my time-zone and yes, I'm feeling guilty for this
long conversation during which you've been so patient) but is it
possible to tamper with these non-standard fonts at all? Are the people
who made them still around? Actually I see new ones still coming out.
Since Times New Roman lacks the heh+hamze, the only choice is to
embed some other font but as you know, they have embedding disabled, not
that they did that on purpose. If all these fonts are available for free,
the owners must not care what is done with them.

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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> font editor like FontLab and some OpenType headache, you should be able to
> fix them yourself. But if you are not in a hurry, just wait a little more
> for our fonts. (I'm sorry for all the promising and nothing released, but
> at least you've seen the screenshot.)

ok, but promise you'll put the heh+hamzeh! I can suvive without teh
marbuta but not without heh+hamzeh!



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Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh

[C Bobroff]

> should be able to get every character we have defined in the standard we
> prepared. To get Heh+Hamza working you may need Windows XP or Office XP
> (I'm not sure, but we will test and announce).

I see the Heh+hamza comes at a price! Hopefully Office XP since
WinXP is still a rarity at least around here...

 But you will also have Heh
> With Small Yeh Above in the font, for a limited time, to bypass
> technological limitations.
That would be just fine! Thank you!

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[farsiweb]Re: How To Become A Hacker

[C Bobroff]

> (BTW, there is also some good points there that relate to recent
> discussions on the lists. All similarities are accidental!)
>

Roozbeh,
Maybe you'll find these articles from the Weft forum interesting. They
also relate to the recent discussion. (Nice to hear there are languages
worse off than Persian!)

---
To: Microsoft WEFT users community <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Daily digest for Microsoft WEFT users community

Hindi character spacing problem

>>From: ObsessedWithHindi
>Message 9 in Discussion
>A lot of developers enaged in developing websites in indic languages, are
>facing the same problem: spaces between letters. We have been following
>the messages posted to this community and answers provided to them by
>different people, but unfortunately, nobody seems to have the final
>solution to this problem. People who have somehow solved this problem,
>are trying to cash in on it. Why on earth nobody with a solution comes
>forward to solve this problem of thousands of Indian languages
>developers? Why those who have somehow found a solution forget the fact
>that even Microsoft has provided this tool for free? Its unfortunate that
>these developers are not helping others with their solutions and are not
>helping the Hindi language in becoming a true Net friendly language.
>After this charged speech, could I expect someone to help me remove those
>ugly spaces between my Hindi characters? I use Weft 3, Kruti Dev 020
>font, Internet Explorer 6, encoding x-user-defined, on IIS 5.0. I would
be quite thankful.

>>From: ObsessedWithHindi
>Message 9 in Discussion
>Prabudh,your reply was quite explanatory and enlightening. however, i
>don't think anybody would doubt the fact that Unicode is the road to
>future for all languages, for obvious reasons. Still, if it's not getting
>popular among the Indian language developers then it is either the market
>or the Indian government to be blamed. While our users are not ready to
>adopt new ways, the government is not concerned about the need of the
>hour: to promote and affect standardisation at different levels in the
>Indian languages computing world.Every developer is going his own way
>when it comes to development in Indian langauges. People are still coming
>up with tools with options to use old keyboard layouts (I have seen
>applications that offer 15-20 keyboard layouts) and 7-bit, 8-bit fonts.
>Even Microsoft is doing the same in its Office XP. We are teaching people
>to type in Hindi by actually typing in English (transliteration method).
>Why should users not be taught to type in Hindi itself and using only
>one, universal method?Where will the horses running in different
>directions lead the cart to? Is there no force on the earth to direct and
>enable developers to move towards a properly defined, future-oriented and
>logical way! As far as I know, there is only be one regulatory power in
>the country and that is the government. It should ensure that only
>Inscript Keyboard layout and Unicode fonts are used by the developers and
>should also come out with goodies for developers such as freely
>distributable unicode fonts etc. And we, developers, may also try to make
>our own contribution to the process, if we can.Baalendu Dadhich

---


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[farsiweb]Some sorting problems

[C Bobroff]

> 2. The Waw(U-0648) is after the 'Heh' (U-0647).

>  I have no idea for the second
> problem.
>

Thanks for posting this problem! I have been wondering
what effect the fact that the Arabic and Persian alphabets
have different ORDER of letters would have on all this.
Now I got my answer! (And of course, as usual can not
be helpful in solving the technical problem...)
-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

> to the Heh-Waw problem. They actually check the Arabic order first, and
> sometimes find that the list is really in Persian order!"

This seems like a good case where putting the  could serve
a useful purpose.

> But about people doing this, everyone should have an additional filter for
> sorting Persian.
If you see such a thing already made, let me know!
Otherwise, for now I'll just regard it as an unnecessary luxury!

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> I have written a sort specification table for GNU C Library, which has
> been distributed with Red Hat Linux since 7.1. When I want to sort
> something, I use that (we don't use Windows machines as servers).
>
> Just tell me to post instructions to use, if that may help.

Thanks!
I'm not sure what I need. I was thinking more on the lines of a nice
shrink-wrapped (aak-band) javascript program to just cut and paste into
the one running on my website!
My institution uses an Apache server and things like PHP scripting
languages are supported but I wouldn't wouldn't even know how
to get started since I'm NOT a hacker, just someone trying to make
a webpage!

But by all means post what you have. I'm sure there are plenty of
people who would benefit, if not now, later and would be
extremely grateful for the assistance.

-Connie






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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

Actually, upon persual of this handy php tutorial,
http://www.php.net/tut.php

it does seem within the realm of possibility for me to get such a thing
implemented on my website.
What lengths one has to go to in order to make a Persian webpage!!
If you folks who've already figured out the trick can post the complete
code with all problem letters accounted for plus lots of newbie
directions, I'll try my best to implement it and not let you down!

BTW, I can understand the heh-waw reversal and the 4 extra Persian letters
being dumped at the end, but please tell me, why is the "kaf"  out of
order?

Thanks,
Connie



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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

ok! I did not think about all these things!
Thank you for the info!

> The codes for
> Persian Kaf and Yeh (called "Keheh" and "Farsi Yeh" in Unicode) are also
Who invented the term "keheh"?


> Programming, asking to implement how librarians do sorting: They sort
> "2001: A Space Odyssey" in "T", for a start.
Seems like a good idea to me to put numbers in 2 places--once in numerical
order and once in spelled out order, especially back in pre-computer
days...
-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

> Actually, it said they only put it in "T".

According to Library of Congress and British Library cataloging rules,
they are SUPPOSED to cross reference. What some lazy librarians may
actually do in practice is another matter!
In this case, he may also have found the title in question by looking
first under "T" and not have realized he could have also found it under
"2".

But back to sorting. I'm still trying to understand how this works. If
I put a PHP script to sort the Persian words correctly, will that then
override all the Arabic default sorting whether in a javascript program
or anything else?
And if I should want to sort something according to Arabic order (I don't
actually!), that will no longer be possible??

Sorry for the newbie-style questions. Before, I was actually quite
thrilled that it could even sort in Arabic order!

Thanks,
Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

>   for Filing Catalog Cards* (Chicago, 1942):
>   [...]
Well, the rule nowadays is that there MUST at least be an entry under
"2001" since that is the actual title.
Thank goodness the days of card catalogs are overwell, mostly over!


>  and "al-"
> is ignored in Arabic names.
...unless names spelled as "el-" as in the north African sytle
>

> I'm not sure I get you. When you sort, you give it a collation ruleset. If
> you want to write some code for sorting strings, it's good to make it able
> to get the ruleset name and sort based on it. Your function should be able
> to get 'ar' or 'fa' as a paremeter and sort based on that.

I have set the page to "utf-8".
AR or FA makes no difference,  unicode only knows one sorting order: AR

There is really no reason to put FA unless the unicode consortium makes
a separate sorting order for FA, right??

But if you people have a patch that can be put on the page, that will
do the same thing I guess.

> You will then use the Arabic sort in your Arabic pages and Persian sort in
> your Persian pages.
Oh, I meant if on one page you have both!

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Farsi Sorting

[C Bobroff]

> Sorry Connie for being so late in replying...
No problem!

> > Oh, I meant if on one page you have both!
> I can't understand. You have a sample somewhere?
I personally have only Persian for now but just wanted to know for the
future.  It looked like the patch that people were talking about earlier
would sort everything (whether you wanted Arabic sorting or Persian
sorting)  according to Persian sorting, that is to say, it was a
page-wide fix, not something to add to individual components on the page.

Of course, as I said, I was happy enough earlier just to get the Persian
sorted according to Arabic, now if there' a way to get Persian sorted
to Persian, nothing like it! For now there are perhaps not too many
people needing both languages on one page (website?).

thanks,
Connie

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[farsiweb]Re: the two ye and how they may be differentiated

[C Bobroff]

Ali,
The Word doc problem is not just limited to the 2 yeh's in Persian.  I've
sent Persian Word docs to people using various versions of Windows
(without anyone deliberately changing any settings) and several letters
have been transposed from the recipient's point of view.
As for web pages, it appears for Persian you have to design a seperate
page for each browser! You will note that on many (most?) Persian web
sites catering to an international audience you'll find the standard "my
site can only be viewed on a Windows machine running IE 5+".
>From what I gather, Microsoft made some error in the very beginning and
switched the 2 yehs. But now the wrong way has become so well entrenched
that it's become the "right" way and the problem continues to propagate
itself.
>From what I see with Netscape 4.x, Persian sites normally look fine with
just
some bidirectional problems. As for NS 6.2, the direction problem is
solved but the 2 yehs are "corrected" and if there are any small vowels in
the text, they break up the words. (Therefore I'd prefer the results in
the earlier 4.x to that!)
>From my limited use of Mozilla, I've found the results to be pretty much
the same as IE concerning the yeh's  (and again, I mean if no one has
tinkered with the default settings.)
And I should mention, if you can expect your user to download one of the
many free Persian fonts out there (you know the ones, the "non-standard"
ones everyone seems to be using) it will mask the 2 dots problem on final
yeh's although nothing can of course be done about the problem with the
final yeh (what looks like alef maksura) coming in medial position. The
"times new roman" font (the windows default) will show the 2 dots on the
final yeh if you have that yeh there since that font is used for Arabic as
well.
So I guess you have the moral question again: correct the yehs and do the
future generations a favor and help standardize Persian computing OR make
your website usable NOW for majority of users even though you may have to
redo everyting tomorrow! Not an easy question!!
-Connie

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[farsiweb]Re: unicode fields in database

[C Bobroff]

Suggestion:
Instead of someone new asking every 3 months "how can I sort Persian?",
why doesn't one of you who is technically astute please compile all these
sorting patches and put them in one place with a description of bugs and
features of  each and some step-by-step instructions on how to implement
them?  The younger generation is going to get accustomed to looking at the
end of the alphabet for certain  letters and not be sure whether heh or
vav comes first so better hurry!
-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]Re: unicode fields in database

[C Bobroff]

>  I will be able to put any such HOWTO on the FarsiWeb web site,
OK! We'll add that to Roozbeh's [fast-growing] list of chores  :)

> The young generation are clearly taught about the main order.
I guess the clever youngsters will learn to double check both places lest
they miss out on the stuff at the end of the alphabet!  That's the fun of
Pers^H^H^H  Farsi computing, you always have to search in 2 places for
EVERYTHING.

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> The YEH problem in Windows SHOULD be fixed be installing new fixed fonts.
Speaking of Windows, I have heard unsubstantiated reports that even with
WinXP, the "yeh" (06CC--on the "d" key) works great in some editing
programs such as Word but even on the same computer, fails to work in
other programs. Again, I have not verified that this is the case but I'm
not surprised by anything concerning the Yeh anymore.

Also, it's true that the fonts have been corrected concerning the yeh.
However, the people in the Microsoft Typography dept who have removed the
free font downloads don't seem to know that there is no way to legally
obtain the corrected fonts (unless they "upgrade".)

> The solution is very simple. It is called loose searching, and has been
> there for a long time.
Just curious: What if you are searching for an Arabic  word but you are
inputting your search in FA mode (maybe you are more familiar with the
keyboard layout, etc.)  Since some of the yeh forms in Arabic and Persian
are identical (in appearance) but have different unicode values, will this
not adversely affect your search?

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> That will be correct if you replace with "when using other fonts".
That's what one would think but I'm told it happens with same font. If I
get more info, I'll report.

>   http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
I took a look. It looks fair but not legal!

> This will affect your search and find all the other Yehs also.
Thanks, Roozbeh. I was just wondering how that all works.

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

> You can't revoke a license by not just providing the software anymore.

A lot of software starts out free and buggy then over time, becomes a
viable commercial product and not for free. However, the people who did
pay money for defective fonts should definitely be allowed to get the
corrected font for free. (Not that the corrected fonts are 100% correct
anyhow.)

You are making me play devil's advocate here when the truth is, I only
want to facilitate progress, not waste your time. I will probably just put
a link to http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ to help those in need now that
I even know it exists.

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

> For making sure you won't scare newbies,
Oh, thank you! You are finally catching on that when it comes to us
newbies, nothing can be left to chance!!

Thanks also to the person(s) who made all these fonts available. I realize
I might have sounded ungrateful when in fact, any and all efforts to help
people do Persian computing must be welcomed.
-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

> On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, C Bobroff wrote:
> > I will probably just put a link to http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ to
> > help those in need now that I even know it exists.

OK, Mr Connie genius managed to take a look at the sourceforge downloads
and guess what, no TimesNewRoman and no Tahoma! Anticlimax!

I just emailed Microsoft and they said those 2 were never part of the free
downloads and it's illegal to distribute.

They told me to go to:
http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp

for win2000 font updates.
WinXP users should already be in good shape. As for
pre-Win2000, as you know, there was no *official* MS support.

I'm also going to ask them to figure out why ZWJ isn't working (at least
for me) with a lot of letters in TImes New Roman (although Tahoma is
fine.)

(Why I'm going to these lengths to improve fonts I would never consider
using to type Persian in, I can't imagine :) )

If anyone else has spotted some problems, please mention otherwise
Microsoft will never know there's a problem.

-Connie


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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> There is Times New Roman there. The file is named 'times32.exe'. I guess
> you missed it.

I didn't *miss* it. I thought it was a different font. I stand corrected.
You're also right that it was on the free downloads page which can still
be viewed here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020206194652/www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm


> The guys at MS just don't remember.
Now I will remind them and mention they should let me put a copy on my
website for distribution as the license clearly states. The soureforge
site is just too newbie-unfriendly!

> IIRC, fonts like 'Arabic Transparent' are not in good shape for XP.
Oh! I took one look at that one and fled. Got enough problems with the
core fonts.
If you have a list of problems though, I'll be sure to pass it along.


>  Sometimes,
> when Paul got tired of me nagging, he just asked a question in return: "Do
> you have a valid license for the product?"
Delightful!
Then just let me know and I'll handle the nagging. That's one thing I'm
good at! (Actually I'm thinking I should get Paul to fly you in to the
"campus" for the afternoon...you could have a regular bug-fixing spree!)


>  should be very easy.
LOL! Your sense of humor becomes more refined as the night wears on.  A
regal treat awaits the silent lurkers who are just now getting out of bed.

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

Special thanks are in order to Andrew Cunningham who'd already made this
page a while back but I only noticed just this second:

http://www.openroad.net.au/support/notes/persian.html

Very nice!

-Connie


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Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision

[C Bobroff]

I just heard from Paul at Microsoft.  They don't care if the fonts from
the removed typography page are distributed however, you should know they
are not the most recent editions.  At least the Yeh is correct though.
That was our main concern.

-Connie

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[farsiweb]Re: [PersianComputing] Unicode character names (was Re: UnicodeAdvertisement)

[C Bobroff]

>  and a requirement of ISO
> that the names stay the same forever, even if mistakes are found in them.
> Standards need to guarantee stabilities to some degree in order to be
> implemented, and character names looked one of the promising cases.

I see now! Thank you once again for the enlightenment.  I only wish I'd
asked earlier.

-Connie

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[farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> Attached file [.pdf] is preview of New Persian Keyboard layout preview.

Thanks.  That's very helpful. Must have taken quite some time to make!

What is the character on alt+control+d ? It's putting me in footnote mode.
Possibly related to the fact I don't have MS Arial Unicode (or whatever
it's now called) installed?? Or maybe that's supposed to be the tatweel??

And forgive my ignorance but when do you use subscript alif? I've only
used it in Pakistani contexts.

And by the way, is anyone else using WinXP/OfficeXP not able to
find/replace short vowels by themselves? It only seems to work when
combined with another letter.

Thanks again,

-Connie

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[farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> > What is the character on alt+control+d?
> It's the Arabic Alef Maksura. For cases you just need a "dandaane" in the
> middle of a word. Almost always Koranic quotes.

I also have only heard of Alif Maksura used in Arabic only in Final
position, never in initial, medial or isolated.

Please give an example of "dandaane" which must be a Persian invention in
which case why don't you use Persian Yeh?

(I haven't yet gotten around to nagging for all the letters to be
made without dots
as used by the poets...maybe this will come in handy for that!)

> > Or maybe that's supposed to be the tatweel??
> No, Tatweel is at Shift+"-".
Oh, sorry. I didn't see it but then, I've never used it.


> We use it under Yeh sometimes, to mention that this Yeh has an /i:/ sound,
> and not an /ej/ sound.
Yes, that's exactly the Pakistani (and Indian) usage I've seen.

>The usage is usually educational or Koranic.
I can't think where in the Koran. If you think of an example, let me know.
Of course, there will always be someone, somewhere who uses it so always
best to keep it around since it doesn't cost anything!

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> If you can't take my word, I can go and search a Koran next time I went
> home. I don't have a Koran in the office.

And you wouldn't want to check any online Koran sites since that seems to
always entail getting your inbox filled with spam from Nigeria as a
consequence! I just love those!


> Guess what? It's already done. Unicode has the dotless forms of all Arabic
> letters already encoded. Exercise for the reader: Look at the charts and
> list all of them.
Exercise for the fontmaker: make them!

> That is used in older Iranian Korans. The new Koranic orthography doesn't
> use that signe anymore. The older Iranian orthography of Koran used it
> everywhere there was an /i:/ sound. Just get your hand on a Koran
> published in Iran in the 1970s.

Oh! Thank you. I will check!

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Re: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> Who are you addressing here? A fontmaker that is planning to support the
> whole Unicode Arabic range? She/he will definitely support them. But a
> fontmaker who is only interested in one language? Why in hell should
> she/he support them?

Hey, it's the Persian poets who liked to engage in tajnis.

-Connie

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Re: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> What if a fontmaker doesn't care about all those linguistics-only needs,
> and wants to give his mates just some support for their language proper,
> as used in modern times, and only in official letters?

Good point.  Glad I'm keeping my jpeg-making software handy.

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RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows

[C Bobroff]

>  I am not quite sure in which context standalone
> versions of maddah, hamzah above and hamzah below are used, but assume
> they are there because they are in the Unicode standard.

In a textbook, you might want to say, "This here is a maddah".  In the
past, I wanted to show what a superscript alif compared to fatha looks
like and was not able to

-Connie


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RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows

[C Bobroff]

> You should put them either over a space, or a Tatweel (U+0640, the base
> line extender that looks like a '_').
>

Just over a space is fine but the font should be able to render it and the
fontmakers don't always know what all people may want to type.  If the
fontmakers see it's a character on the keyboard, they might make an
isolated form.  Then if the user can type anything and everything desired,
great stuff can be written in Persian and we can stop this jpeg/gif/latin
transliteration business! Best to make it as easy as possible to type
everything!

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RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows

[C Bobroff]

> Depends on how you define "easy". Try!

If you don't redefine your concept of "easy", people are going to say it's
too hard to bother with this script and that's why they advocate
romanizing Persian.

Do you know just to enable FA input on a Windows machine is asking too
much for newbies? You should see the emails filled with anguish I get.
"Your instructions are no good! The farsi editor isn't downloading", etc.
And these newbies are the same ones most apt to have great content worthy
of the technology too but they just get too frustrated at the
word-processing stage and give up.

I was even joking with someone at MS that a first-time user should be able
to sit down at the comptuer and say, "Please activate Persian" and
automatically FA will be enabled, Word will fire up, nastaliq font at
reasonable fontsize selected and RTL/right-aligned  mode on and on-screen
keyboad at your service!

Even this probably won't be sufficient...

-Connie

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RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

 (This is why I found the dotless initial form on your draft
> keyboard difficult to interpret.)

Oh! Is THAT what that was.

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RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> An exhausted roozbeh

An exhausted but euphoric Roozbeh?
Admit it, you're enjoying every minute!

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RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> The visa won't get ready until Monday morning either.

Just in case the visa doesn't come Monday, you might consider making a
transliterated keyboard layout for those occasional Persian typists used
to the English keyboard.


-Connie

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RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

> The visa won't get ready until Monday morning either. So I'm getting more
> frustrated, and I stick more to work. The whole reason I came to office
> today was to read possible emails on what happened with the visa.

No, I've alerted all the embassies of the world not to issue you any more
visas for conferences.  Look how much we all have  profited from
the fruits of your visa frustations of the past few days--a very nice
keyboard, installation instructions + documentatin and so many questions
answered! Your sacrifice is GREATLY appreciated!

-Connie

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RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview

[C Bobroff]

>  If you mean
> the software, it took about half an hour or a little more because of the
> nice MS tool for its creation.

Yes, that's what I meant and it took YOU half an hour but would have taken
me and the silent lurkers weeks or possibly never so thank you.
And did I hear you say, "nice MS tool"? Hmmm



> Oh, while we're at it, would you tell your MS friends to all a ZWNJ on
> Shift+Space with their tool? I went through many tricks to get it done,
> but the keyboard compiler catches me at the final second always.

I already told my friends at MS!

But the NICE TOOL doesn't recognize ZWJ or ZWNJ to be spaces.  (The space
bar is only for spacing characters.) Maybe your friends at Unicode haven't
properly labelled it so the NICE TOOL can tell what it is??

-Connie

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Re: [PersianComputing] RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows

[C Bobroff]

> > I may help you with information from ALA-LC (American Library
> > Association/Library of Congress) containing exact lists of characters,
> > alongside with standard transliterations, for all languages you are
> > interested in.

For whatever they're worth, they're here as PDF files:

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html

-Connie

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RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows

[C Bobroff]

> No, no Nastaliq font. It's not the default for Persian anymore. People
> have a hard time reading Nastaliq for anything longer than a few words.

OK, bye-bye Nastaliq for Persian.

But I mean Persian Naskh or Naskhi as opposed to Arabic Naskh. I wish
there were a precise term to differentiate the two. And I don't know what
my newbies are going to do when I tell them to type in "MS Uighur" or
"Traffic" for that modern Persian look! Crazy!

-Connie

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Re: [PersianComputing] Koodak font: alpha release

[C Bobroff]

There is already a font called Koodak. Won't users (and their computers)
have a problem when they THINK they are seeing this font but it's really
the old one? It won't occur to them to download the new one.

-Connie

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> As part of a set of TTF fonts we are planning to release in
> 100% Unicode-compatible format, we are happy to release our first font,
> Koodak.  This font is in alpha status, and we need your help in order to
> fix possible bugs.  Installation instructions are at the end of this
> notice.
>
> The font itself, is available from:
>
>http://www.farsiweb.info/font/koodak.zip
>
> You can report bugs to:
>
>mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Please note that we are only claiming support for Red Hat Linux 8.0 and
> 9 (and future releases) and Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP (and future
> versions).  The fonts may work on other operating systems or platforms,
> but we have no plan to test or support them (although we will be very
> happy to hear about possible bugs).  Also, note that sometimes the bug
> is in the OS or the software, not in the font: one can't fix a buggy
> software by changing a font.
>
> These are the known bugs that we are planning to fix in later versions:
>
>   * The following glyphs are not supported: Rial sign, Arabic-style
> digit four, Arabic-style digit six, Oranate parentheses.
>   * Tashdid ligatures (Tashdid+Fathe, ...) do not work as supposed.
>   * Positioning of E'raabs is not implemented (so Kasra is too low for
> some characters).
>   * Base letter+Mark ligatures (He+Hamze, Alef+Tanvin) are not
> implemented.
>
> Important licensing information: This font is based on 'Bitstream Vera'
> and the publicly-available 'Koodak' font. Because of the certain
> restrictions in those, you are limited in what you can do with this
> font. This is only true for this alpha release, and the final licensing
> may be different:
>
>   1. You may only distribute this font as is, without any change. You
>  may NOT change the font, and you may NOT rename the font.
>
>   2. You are allowed to redistribute this font gratis (by itself or as
>  part of a package), but you may NOT sell this font by itself or as
>  a part of a fonts-only package). But you are allowed to sell it
>  together with some computer software.
>
> For more specific details, please see the 'licensing' information in the
> font itself.
>
> Installation instructions for Red Hat Linux 8.0 and 9:
>
>   1. unzip koodak.zip
>   2. mkdir -p ~/.fonts
>   3. cp -bf koodak.ttf ~/.fonts
>   4. fc-cache ~/.fonts
>
> Installation instructions for MS Windows 2000 and XP:
>
>   1. Unzip the koodak.zip file.
>   2. Go to "Control Panel -> Fonts".
>   3. Delete all copies of any font you may have installed on your system
>  named 'Koodak', 'Koodak Bold', ...
>   4. Install the 'Koodak' font from the menu.
>
> Roozbeh Pournader,
> for the FarsiWeb Project Group
>
>
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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> ... so many
> sites are using wrong characters. It certainly affects the search
> engines.

Hehe. The humans don't seem to notice but the search engines balk. Seems
like it should be the reverse!

By the way, this is yet another reason I offer up thanks to Roozbeh,
Behnam (and others) for the new Persian keyboard as the Arabic Yeh is
only a convenient Shift key away and makes for much more fruitful Google
searches!

-Connie


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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

>  What should we do about this?
Go stand up on your roof and shout:
"The fonts have been repaired! It's now ok to use Arabic Letter Farsi Yeh
U+06CC!!"

But as far as I know, BBC has never been one of the offenders although I'm
too lazy at the moment to check that and the other site  mentioned
earlier.  Anyhow, the default fontsize is usually too small to even see
those nasty dots not to mention the Yeh itself.

Why don't you do a survey and check some sites today and then check
back again in a couple of months.  Chances are, your having started this
thread (and the one last week) will have served as a wake-up call. Perhaps
that's all that was needed!

-Connie

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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> Well, thank the original designers of ISIRI 2901:1994.
Thank you!

Hey, is there any chance Behnam can be coaxed into making a transliterated
keyboard based on the English layout? Not for me personally, mind you. It
appears to be a highly sought after accessory and I keep getting
inquiries. Behnam, what do you say?

Oh, I forgot to mention to Ali earlier that Yahoo messenger (and others?)
also has the Arabic Yeh problem. Those people maybe should be contacted as
they may not have representation among the silent lurkers and not know
there's a problem. Note, don't ask me to do it as I would undoubtedly tell
them something incorrect and botch things up even further.

-Connie


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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> If you use Yahoo Messenger and care about Persian Yeh support, do it
> yourself. If you don't, somebody who cares will do so eventually. If
> nobody does so, it means nobody cares.

OK, I took up your challenge and just emailed Yahoo. Don't blame me when
we discover they've replaced Arabic Yeh with CYRILLIC LETTER YA U+042F!

-Connie

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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> I don't like it. I wasn't challenging you. 'Was challenging the silent
> lurkers.
Oops! I just couldn't stop myself...was on a roll!
-Connie



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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> Behdad's Law: Connie is an optimist.
If you please! You need to trust Mr. Connie Genius on this one and keep
the faith. This is just a case of public awareness. As long as you don't
notice those dots, everything is blissful. Maybe they are just stray
marks? Maybe your screen just needs cleaning? But then once you do notice,
then you REALLY notice. Those two little dots get under your skin and it
starts to fester. You start to ONLY see the dots and the rest of the
content becomes a blur. Insanity is imminent. The only solution: Immediate
surgical removal of the dots using the latest Search/Replace technology.
-Connie

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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> They do get under the skin, yes, but it's a little worse than that if
> you start seeing the two little dots everyday on announcements,
> printouts, ads, ... It will get to your {maghz-e ostekhaan}.

Oh dear! You sound like an advanced case. I will schedule you for a
bone-marrow transplant right away.

Just don't tell me the calligraphers have also joined the band-wagon and
are now putting the dots!

-Connie

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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> You know, everybody who's caring and sane enough to proofread, makes
> sure these don't appear on paper (or sometimes on the computer screen),
> but again, not all of these people care what it is that's stored in
> their computers.

On the other hand, how much time it looks like they put into the
proofreading  may be a convenient way to tell if the content is
worth reading!

By the way, I just visited the BBC Persian site. In one article they were
using the Arabic Kaf and in another the Persian Keheh. That would explain
the conflicting reports on the Yeh. Looks like they have more than one
typist on the staff.

-Connie

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Re: Unicode in new IRNA site

[C Bobroff]

> > By the way, I just visited the BBC Persian site. In one article they were
> > using the Arabic Kaf and in another the Persian Keheh.
>
> It should be called the Persian Kaf. Keheh is just a random identifier,
> but the best available since it's the Unicode name. So, either "Persian
> Kaf" or "Keheh" in my opinion. And the second only for people who
> understand Unispeak.


I had written "Keheh" but then went back and added "Persian" to be
clearer...
In any case, whatever you call it, they were using the Arabic counterpart.
-Connie

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Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 4, Issue 9

[C Bobroff]

> On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 16:38, Behnam wrote:
> > But in the meantime, do you know where is the "small Alef" for
> > putting on the Final Yeh (in "hattaa" for example) or Farsi Hamza
> > (Yeh-e-raabet) that we put on the final Heh in this standard layout? I
> > couldn't find them anywhere.

For future reference, in Unicode parlance, they call these ARABIC LETTER
SUPERSCRIPT ALIF U+0670 and Arabic Hamza Above U+0654.

They are not on the "Farsi Keyboard" that ships with Win2000 and WinXP
however it is easy enough to map them to the keyboard manually in Word.

If you get Farsiweb's experimental keyboard or Peter Hauer's Keyman
keyboard (search the archives for both), you
will find both characters conveniently located on the keyboard.

The problem as always is the font. For web use, almost everyone is using
the Tahoma font which contains both characters (as well as the Persian Yeh
and the Persian Kaf). Unfortunately, neither character positions very
nicely and you probably won't want to use them when you see what they look
like in action! If for non-web use, well, there are many Persian fonts
around hacked for computer use without the original designer's permission
(becoming a hot topic nowadays!) and you can usually find the heh+hamzeh
hacked to the tah marbuta and as for the alif, I recommend a fine-tipped
felt pen or Photoshop!

There are various other ingenious workarounds, of course.

I don't know what the situation is with Macs where the main problem seems
to stem from  not enough users doing Persian in order to provide feedback
and mutual support.

-Connie
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Re: persian-language.org

[C Bobroff]

On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Was googling around, found the above site by chance.
Uhh, what site?

-Connie
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Re: persian-language.org

[C Bobroff]

> > On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Hey Mr Connie Genius,
> The subject line ;).
> http://www.persian-language.org/
Hehe. It's not for nothin' I'm called "Mr Connie Genius"!

Yeah, I knew what was coming as I was treated to those 2 beautiful final
dots of "farsi" in the  of the page long before the page actually
loaded!

So what action should be taken here ? Shall I send a nastygram to the
webmaster written on the official stationery of the Dots Police?

I was even thinking of opening up a Yeh Museum the other day. If I can get
folks to scan and email me these specimens of announcements/invitations on
printed paper with the Arabic Yeh's I will create a beautiful photo
gallery as a tribute to this historic phenomonon! I mean it--send them in.
It'll be cool!

Actuallyand I'm risking exposing more of my genius tendancies
hereI wanted to ask what I misunderstood along the line because I was
under the impression that search engines or any search tool had been
instructed to consider Arabic and Persian Yeh's to be the same. Yet it is
a sad fact that if you do a Google search for a Persian word with final
yeh, you'd better use the Arabic yeh.

-Connie
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Re: persian-language.org

[C Bobroff]

> Ever considered having a nick name of Joe?  See: "Mr Joe Genius".
Those Qazvini's really like my name and I've had a lot of fun with it, and
it has generated much laughter and good-will, therefore it stays.

> Tell them you are going to put them in your black list if they
> don't act in 24 hours.  Don't forget to tell them that as a
> consequence, most major proxies around the world (not in Iran!)
> would block their site.

Got it. Will do.

> Roozbeh has a nice masterpiece for you musuem, but that's not dot
> related.  A bidi problem, printed 001 instead of 100.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and
those who don't.

> They do NOT do special handling this.
Well, maybe it's time for a re-think on this.


-Connie
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Re: persian-language.org

[C Bobroff]

> They *could* be instructed. Google is very bad in linguistics, specially
> when considering Persian.


Oh? So they ARE supposed to be equal and the problem is with Google and
not with those tables. I'm greatly relieved!
Next question:  Why hasn't Google been instructed? How can we give it a
refresher course in linguistics?


> Really, you'd better use both :((

You are cruel!

-Connie
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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: SOLVED: Button translation

[C Bobroff]

> Isn't this only about *English* button labels?

I was going to ask the same thing...
-Connie
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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: SOLVED: Button translation

[C Bobroff]

>  Missing anything?
Behdad,
I think it's best we leave the high-faluttin grammatical stuff like
"infinitive" and "imperative" to Amr and Zayd :)

The person who wrote that article definitely didn't have Persian in mind.
In Persian there is much greater overlap in both form and function than
English.  Furthermore, there are an awful
lot of modern compound verbs in Persian where the first element is a noun
or adjective which you may want to treat differently than one-word verbs.

A button with "to print" or "printing" in English is not helpful, that's
why the author specified *imperative* but he meant you should put a
meaningful word so that the user not hesitate at all.

For one-word verbs, one often sees the infinitive functioning as
imperative, for example "ferestadan" and for compound verbs, one often
sees just the noun such as "chap".  If someone is suggesting "chap
kardan", it is probably in hopes of making one rule for all verbs and
ruling out ALL chances of making the user hesitate as the article said.
I personally think "chap" ( possibly accompanied by an attractive icon)
is great!
I think we can guarantee the true imperative forms don't have a chance in
the discussion: "chap kon" (sounds like Mawlavi!)
and "chap konid" (school teacher??) although they are best in English.

Same thing with the "bookmark" issue earlier. Is it really helpful to
go to the ends of the earth looking for the perfect translation of some
cute expression in English of a browser specific term? You are forcing the
user to translate back into English instead of giving some idea of what
that button actually does.  That is fine if the user already knows
English and is familiar with the concept and the button is more
decorative than functional.  To be fair, I think at least one person
suggested something which came closer to conveying the actually meaning.
(I wasn't paying too much attention and was only glad the original poster
didn't ask how to translate "spam"!)

-Connie

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Re: Font Problem (fwd)

[C Bobroff]

> I have heared that incompatibility with unicode in such fonts cause these
> problem.

Payam,
I don't think it's related to incompatibility with unicode. I have XP and
after all the critical updates all my Persian fonts are working fine.
Hopefully you can just download and install the fonts again.
-Connie
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Re: Font Problem (fwd)

[C Bobroff]

> You goofed Connie.  Forgot that there are zillions of different
> versions of those fonts?

Beggin' your pardon but I did not goof!
How could I possibly forget there are zillions of different versions?!
However, they all have one thing in common and that is that they aren't
unicode compliant and that was the expressed concern.
-Connie
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Re: Font Problem (fwd)

[C Bobroff]

As I said, I have many non-unicode compliant fonts on my XP and they were
not affected by the critical updates so perhaps something else is
involved.

Next question:
What are all these font packages we are suddenly hearing about? I only
know about Farsiweb's Koodak which I thought was under construction and
not yet ready for distribution. Perhaps Mehran and Behnam could provide
some details about these fonts. Are they complete? Do they have all the
characters? Do the diacritics position correctly?  I'm worried there's
going to be many fonts with the same names but different behaviors.

-Connie

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Re: Embeding farsi font for web pages

[C Bobroff]

Sadeq,
The secret is that the font must have  embedding permission enabled.
You can check permissions on the font with this free tool:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/property/property.htm

The Farsiweb Koodak font will work although that is still under
construction.  I'm guessing Mehran's fonts mentioned earlier today will
also work and if so, that will be great since they are unicode-compliant.
Mehran?

I've successfully used Borna's fonts with Weft a long time ago:
http://www.bornaray.com/en_fonts.asp?fn=per_fonts&rfn=en_fonts&parent=fontslist&Grand=Main

These fonts are not unicode-compliant but since you are embedding, as long
as you specify UTF-8, that should also work.

Of course Weft is only for WIndows and Internet Explorer. Also, if the
system administrator has configured the computer in such a way that
certain settings are forced on the user, then also Weft won't work.
However, Weft may be one solution to insure the user sees YOUR font since,
as we've been discussing of late, one font name can be a zillion different
fonts.

-Connie
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Re: decimal point

[C Bobroff]

> On Sat, 2003-10-25 at 20:15, Payam Poursaied wrote:
> > I'm realy intestet to know why it is set to use comma "," instead of slash
> > "/" for persian decimal point (decimal seperator)?

> "What" is set to do that? For the correct decimal separator behaviour,
> see ISIRI 6219 at
> , page 8 
> (PDF page 16).
> roozbeh

Obviously Payam has a Persian font hacked for use in Europe.  What I like
are these European made Persian fonts which need a comma for the decimal
separator but there isn't one so the user has to use the letter Reh to
make a comma in numerical amounts!

-Connie
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Re: Embeding farsi font for web pages

[C Bobroff]

> On Sat, 2003-10-25 at 09:14, C Bobroff wrote:
> > I'm guessing Mehran's fonts mentioned earlier today will
> > also work and if so, that will be great since they are unicode-compliant.
> No, the fonts Merhan pointed to are not Unicode compliant. The only
> Unicode compliant fonts I know that support Persian, are MS fonts and
> our experimental Koodak.
> roozbeh

Thank you for the correction, Roozbeh.  I should have known I was dreaming
when all these unicode-compliant Persian fonts seem to have
sprung up out of nowhere overnight.
What are the features of these Parsa fonts Behdad mentioned that are on
the farsiweb site? Just the usual fonts, right?

-Connie
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Trick or Treat!!

[C Bobroff]

Hi Everyone,
We are celebrating Halloween over here this weekend so I've prepared a
real SCARY treat for you: BBC Persian site as seen on Mac OS X.

students.washington.edu/irina/MacOSX_IE5.2.gif

students.washington.edu/irina/MacOSX_Moz1.4.gif

students.washington.edu/irina/MacOSX_Safari1.0.gif

What is the cause of the font size changes in the latter two?? I don't see
a pattern.

-Connie

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Re: Trick or Treat!!

[C Bobroff]

> Not to mention many more people with names starting or ending with "beh"!
> (like Connie for example !!)
Now that is the one fault I don't have!
Maybe one from among BEHnam (A and B), BEHdad, RoozBEH could change his
name to Joe??

> > pretty simple to hack a workaround in the Mozilla codebase.  Send
> > me an iBook and I will do that in a week.
"Joe Esfahbod's Mac Repair Shop". I like it!

-Connie
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Re: Trick or Treat!!

[C Bobroff]

> A friend of mine in Italy  has Panther installed and he told me that
> everything on his browser is now appearing normal with the exception of
> dotted Yeh, which I don't think is related to the same issue.

If that's the case, try this page:
http://www.macridesweb.com/oltest/translateWord.html

It's a little more cutting-edge for test purposes than BBC what with the
guillemets, diacritics and mouseovers.  (It also sniffs out the fact
you're on a Mac so you'll get a much different experience than Win/IE.)

-Connie


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Re: Trick or Treat!!

[C Bobroff]

FYI.
Looks like Panther doesn't do diacritics.
-Connie


-- Forwarded message --
1)
Date: 05 Oct  2003
From:Frederic Lagrange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

read my article (in French) on Mac OS 10.3 and Arabic at

http://www.macgeneration.com/mgnews/categories/en_passant/
en_passant_104030_1.shtml


--
2)
Date: 05 Oct  2003
From:Dil Parkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

For those who don't read French, I will summarize the article here.
Basically, 10.3 has provided a new Arabic font, Geeza Pro, which
becomes the default Arabic font for most Arabic sites, and this has
solved the problem of the little tiny independent characters mixed in
amongst the bigger connected characters.  You can now go to a site like
Al-Jazeera using Safari and everything is very readable and normal
looking right on the screen.  However, Safari has not solve the problem
of keeping connected letters connected when there is a vowel mark
between them.  A vowel still breaks up a word.  For many sites this is
not a problem, but some papers, like Al-Hayat for example, use vowels
more than others.  Also, there are some 'literary' and religious sites
that use vowels.  As Prof. Lagrange points out, if you find something
on a site that is heavily vowelled (like lines of poetry) and therefore
unreadable, you can copy it into TextEdit and it comes out looking
fine.  In other words, the 'connecting' problem doesn't seem to be
inherent to the system, but just to the program Safari.  For example, I
found a random paragraph in a random article in Al-Hayat with the word
minna 'from us' with a shadda on the nuun.  On Safari the nuun and alif
were separated because of the shadda, but when I copied the paragraph
into textedit, the alif and nuun were connected and it looked great.
The article contains several screen shots, so even if you don't read
French you might benefit by lookiing at it.
By the way, TextEdit still has the punctuation problem that I have
mentioned before, but this can be remedied by using Melel, which has
both a text alignment and a text direction button.

Dil


--
End of Arabic-L:  05 Oct  2003



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Re: Proud To be An Iranian

[C Bobroff]

Shahram,
Not meaning to pick on you personally, but why have you used
Arabic Letter Kaf (0643) and Arabic Letter Yeh (064A) on your website?

I'm truly, honestly asking out of curiosity.  Were the Arabic letters
already mapped to your keyboard or did you reprogram it yourself?  Maybe
you didn't notice??

Especially on this very day when someone else has just posted the
"solution" to this problem (well, it is not the solution, it is a
whitewash but maybe better than nothing), I really can't resist asking and
hope you don't get offended. I just can't help wonder since some of us are
having to take tranquilizers before looking at Persian websites lest the
dots under those Yeh's lead to certain nervous disorders as already
discussed on this list.

-Connie

PS Where is Joe? Did you see over on your
http://www.persian-language.org
they appear to now be using the Persian equivalents on selected newer
articles.  I think there is hope on the horizon!

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Sh. Farzanehfar wrote:

>
> Hope to See all of you Good Friends up there, in a near Future. :)
>
> http://www.iri-brd.com/Farsi/PAGE/bozorganeiran.htm
>
> Shahram Farzanehfar
>
>
> Fax number: 1 (530) 706-7306.
> URL adress: http://kamangir.persianblog.com/
> 
>
> 
> Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
>
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Re: What the hell is this "Yeh" and "Keheh" problem?

[C Bobroff]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, AmirBehzad Eslami wrote:
> , but Win9x users
> cannot view the "Yeh (U+06CC)" and "Keheh (U+06A9)" correctly, because of an
> old version of -default installed- Fonts like Tahoma.

How about if some nice person posts some screenshots of BBC's Persian page
as seen on both Win98 and Win95 with the default font so we can assess the
situation?

That should hopefully be with IE 6 which I was told updates the shaping
engine and  fonts.

I may be wrong so please correct me.  I too am only looking for the right
solution.  You're correct that it's not nice to ask people to download
fonts but if it's only a one-time IE update, that is not asking too much.

-Connie
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Re: What the hell is this "Yeh" and "Keheh" problem?

[C Bobroff]

BEHzad,

> You're right, BBC solves the "Yeh" and "Keh" for all users,
Actually, the only reason I  suggested BBC in the first place was because
I thought they were using Persian characters only! Only after looking at
your gifs did I go back and have a second, more carefull look and found to
my surprise they had actually the Arabic Yeh in medial position. (Although
BBC is not consistent and there is more than one person doing their
typing.)  But in any case, we'd better find a better test site or better
yet, make our own!


> But creates a new problem about "Yeh" and "Keh" for Search Engines.
The search engine problem is the most vital problem and I have no idea why
someone isn't taking action.  I believe in principle, the search engines
are to consider Persian and Arabic Yeh to be the same.  Yet they do not.
Why?  Are the tables they are consulting faulty?  Are they consulting the
wrong tables?  Does no one even know this is a problem?  Who handles this
so they can fix the problem? It is not just Yeh but also Kaf and the
Heh+Hamza variants to name a few.  And what if we WANT the search engine
to distinguish between the Persian and Arabic? I seem to have only
questions and no answers!  I'm not even sure how a webmaster should encode
something like the first line in the Divan of Hafez:
alaa yaa ayyuhaa saaqi ader ka'san wa  naawelhaa
Is that lang="fa" or lang="ar"?
I'm not sure and I don't know what the search engines should think about
this!


> Please note that there are still some users that still use Internet Explorer
> 5,
> 5.5, such as some Coffee Nets in Tehran. I know more users who they still
> run Windows 98, and you know that the "Yeh" and "Keh" is ALSO exists on
> Windows 2000/ME systems.
Someone has just today posted on another thread a very logical explanation
of why someone would choose to stay with the "stone age" technology even
if the improved version is free.  However, I wonder how much can be
attributed to laziness or fear of the unknown?  I wish we had some
statistics for Persian users!  Staying with Netscape 4.x is a luxury only
English users can afford, not Persian!

> Moshkel "Yeh" Farsi daghigan chi hast?
> Hamoon-tor ke midooni, dar UTF-8, baraaye namaayesh harfe "Yeh" Farsi az
> code "#1740;" estefaadeh misheh.
I wonder why you say "#1740;" instead of "U+06CC"?? :) :)

> = Please See the attached file "9xyeh.gif" Now
ok but I'm still waiting to hear if IE6 solves the problem on Win9x
(although I'm pretty sure it won't help you if your WIn2000 is defective.)

> Haalaa BBC chetor moshkel ro hal kardeh?
> Be khiaal khodeshoon kheili Zirakaaneh!
Persian Word-processing: "bringing you yesterday's solutions today!"

> = Please See the attached file "yehatbbc.gif" Now
Thanks! You put a lot of time into this.  I'm sure many will appreciate
hearing the full story.

> Yani agar Win9x user bood, baa yek barnaame in ro tash-khis midim, badesh
> "Yeh" Arabic behesh paass mikonam.
I am slowly starting to think your idea is indeed the solution to the Yeh
and Kaf problem.  I hope the more technically astute people will
also wake up and give you some feedback.  (RoozBEH, are you almost
done cleaning out your Inbox??) Perhaps the script could also check if
the win9x user has IE6 in addition and if so, let them see Persian.

I would like to request that you make a simple webpage and post it
somewhere for newbies to copy and paste.   It would be nice if you put a
little alternating Persian and English content so people see how to switch
between the two. An exterior .CSS file that is 100% compliant with
directions for copying for one's own use would be so nice.  For test
purposes, the Persian content should include some tricky things like
parentheses, diacritics (tashdid, sokun, zir, zabar, pish, etc),
zero-width-joiner, zero-width-non-joiner, heh+hamza, and something
requiring mouseovers (or some such feature requiring the browser to
calculate where the word is on the page.) After making everything as
standard and compliant as possible, also put in your script, and most
important, directions for how to copy and explanation for why it is there,
I think this would be the best.

There are many webdevelopers at international institutions and libraries
being told to put up content in Persian even though they don't even speak
Persian.  There is no authority to consult as to what constitutes the best
Persian website.  Each person seems to find his or her own workaround to
make do with. We really need a model, state-of-the-art Persian website so
that the technology can be worthy of the content and the content worthy of
the technology. What do you say?

-Connie
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Re: What the hell is this "Yeh" and "Keheh" problem?

[C Bobroff]

> Another alternative story: Let's say the writer of the page likes to
> say: "Don't use Arabic Yehs like 'ي', use Persian Yehs like 'ی'."?
BEHzad, please find a way to make the Arabic remain Arabic if the
webmaster has intentionally typed Arabic.  Maybe it's time to start using
those AR and FA lang tags which are so far mainly ornamental??  It's very
common that someone will want both Arabic and Persian text on one page.

> > (RoozBEH, are you almost done cleaning out your Inbox??)
> I'm doing it now. Next shot in 90 days.
I'll see if I can schedule you for a rendezvous with Halley's Comet.

> Very good recommendations.
Oh, and some numbers too (in the event that one day we can make a numbered
list in Persian!)

-Connie

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Re: Trick or Treat!!

[C Bobroff]

BEHnam,
Another for you from the Arabic-L list.

(I'm also glad to see someone else noting that what is SMALL fontsize
in English is WAY TOO SMALL in Perso-Arabic.)

-Connie
-Messages---
1)
Date: 17 Nov  2003
From:Albrecht Hofheinz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:Panther and Arabic

As I have now taken the leap and installed Panther, I can at least
partly answer my own question.

Camino 0.7 and Firebird 0.7 both render vocalized text well-connected.
Camino, however, has a new problem (or at least one that I hadn't
previously noticed): it inserts a angle bracket (? not sure about the
name: >) after each laam-alif ligature. Haven't had time for extensive
testing, but just wish to report this. Firebird doesn't have this
problem, so for now Firebird would appear to be the browser of choice
for Arabic under Panther.

Otherwise, I'm pleased to say that not only are we now approaching
better legibility of Arabic web pages (you have to increase the font
size, though), but that -- as others have reported -- Panther is also
noticeably snappier than Jaguar -- finally an OS X system where I don't
have to curse the speed of my iBook/500. Upgrading went smoothly for
me. If you want to try for yourself, be sure to backup your important
files, repair permissions, and read about the FireWire issues before
you do; do an archive and install; and upgrade to 10.3.1 immediately
after installing 10.3, and before using external FireWire drives. Once
everything is upgraded, repair permissions again, and start working.

Albrecht Hofheinz

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Re: Project to solve Farsi contents problems on the Web

[C Bobroff]

> Dear Roozbeh and Mr. Connie (strange name!),
You may just call me Connie unless you are flaming me in which case, "Mr
Connie Genius" is recommended.

> Do you know why? Because they never found a good article about such topics
> in magazines, books, and even FarsiWeb.info.
Guess they didn't think to check out the magazines from Tel Aviv and Cairo
which is where the action is...
Anyhow, you please continue.  It takes only one person to make a change.
We are listening appreciatively.


> Guys, I know there are a lot of problems about Farsi content.
I don't agree with BEHdad on everything all the time  but he's given you
good advice  here to please use the word Persian where possible when
speaking English.


> I think It would be better to solve them step-by-step.
>Thus, I don't talk about "Arabic Text within Farsi webpage" problem and
Step-by-step is fine but do keep the Arabic issue in mind because if your
script turns Arabic to Persian even if Arabic was intended, we will have a
big problem!

Thanks for your efforts.
Keep up the good work.
-Connie

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Re: Le Monde diplomatique this time

[C Bobroff]

Hey Joe,
What were we supposed to be interested in here?  Is it the good news that
you have discovered the world's first Persian webpage with "charset=utf-8"
instead of "charset=windows-1256" (those French are making great
improvements!)
Or did you want to point out those 2 dots we like to discuss?  Did you
want to complain they don't seem to know about ZWNJ?  Did you think that
since there's mention of Tel Aviv they might have read the magazines on
Persian webdev?
Or is it that you wanted to encourage the silent lurkers to participate
so you thought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could rouse some healthy
discussion and from there, next stop is how to introduce Persian speakers
in Haifa to get rid of their Win9x and then take the idea to Iran?
Joe, it is truly YOU who should be called "genius".  Let's trade names!

-Connie

 On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> Mr Connie Genius,
>
>
> Got some juice for you.  Please go for this one:
>
> http://ir.mondediplo.com/article208.html
>
>
> Mr Joe Dumb
>
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Re: Le Monde diplomatique this time

[C Bobroff]

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, Mehran Mehr wrote:
> Connie Bobroff is an [Israelian] Jewish?

Nope.  I'm a pious mullah from Qazvin.

Sorry if you somehow understood something political in what was basically
a joke aimed at Joe.  (We need a little humor sometimes, you know.)

Anyhow, thanks for the reminder that others are also on this list
discussing Persian problems.  Somehow I forgot! Keep up the
helpful participation and the Yeh/Keheh problem will be solved soon!

-Connie
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Re: Le Monde diplomatique this time

[C Bobroff]

>Well, I hereby ask
> you to contact them and resolve Persian issues including but not
> limited to those too balls, oops dots.

Jr Joe Jenius is a polo player?

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Re: Le Monde diplomatique this time

[C Bobroff]

> No flame fest recently.  Actually was more flirting than war ;).
I'm just glad Saber didn't get flamed for not reading the archives.
(You really got lucky, Saber!)
And if you liked  Le Monde, just wait till Behd^H^H^H Joe presents the
next featured website: it's on the Michael Jackson child molestation case
and the Persian text can not actually be viewed on any known OS or browser
(however the picures are excellent.) Coming soon!


> Well, it's in the archives.  Connie happens to contact webmasters
> and remind them to fix their Persian YEH and KEHs.
Not contact.  I'm still at the fact-finding stage and I'm not liking the
facts too much.
I can really see why there's no incentive to give up the stone-age tools.
BTW, concerning the  Linux option, how does that compare in size /
resource hogging with Windows?  Since a lot of people don't want to do
much more than email and surfing, is there any no-frills option that has
all the speed and efficiency of Win9x AND lets you do Persian? (Of course,
MS could also offer such an alternative.)

-Connie

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Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1

[C Bobroff]

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> he confessed that he
> never knew that Farsi and Persian are the same word in two
> different languages.

Just let us know when we can start saying "Deutsch," "francais,"
"nihon-go," etc as well as "farsi" when speaking English.  They are all
the "right" English words, right? Sounds like fun to me.


> -- Official Flamer
Stand by with your flame thrower.  Looks like this topic is going to be
around for a long time.  Meanwhile, guess which language not only has no
name, it has no fonts, no keyboards, no Yehs, no Kehehs, no Decimal
Separators, no Thousands Separators, no webdev magazines, no online
dictionaries, no wordlists, no Google searching...

And why didn't anyone answer Saber's PersianComputing questions last week?
They were quite reasonable and on topic and even related to Persian
computing!  At least you should have flamed him after he went to all the
trouble to ask all those questions! Your flames are generally
quite entertaining...

Oops, now I'm flaming the Official Flamer. That is not done!

-Connie

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Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1

[C Bobroff]

> Perhaps no one knew the answer. Really.
> roozbeh

Oh!
I hadn't thought of that possibility.
-Connie
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