{Spam:6} Re: Jalaali?!

[Omid K. Rad]

I am forwarding MSFTs reply FYI











From: Kit George
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: February 8, 2005 1:52 AM
To: Omid K. Rad
Cc: Kathleen Carey; Matt Ayers
Subject: RE:
System.Globalization.JalaaliCalendar - Jalaali?





Omid, thanks again for following up. Ill
forward this to our people over here as some specific feedback.



We do go to great lengths to get this
right, and we work closely with relative people in the appropriate cultures to
ensure that we are making the best choices. Inevitably there are situations
where theres some disagreement on an issue, and the best decision is less than
100% clear. But Microsoft leverages all resources at its disposal (including
customer feedback such as your own) in ensuring we have selected the most
appropriate solution. There can be times when we have to pick one choice or
another, even if one party feels thats fundamentally not the best choice.



Thanks for your feedback, we really do
appreciate this kind of help: it makes sure we know what different data we have
to help get this right the first time.



Regards,
Kit



-Original Message-
From: Omid K. Rad
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005
2:12 PM
To: Kit George
Subject: System.Globalization.JalaaliCalendar
- Jalaali?



Ref. Suggestion ID: FDBK17514



Hi Kit,

Thank you for your attention and following
up. Regarding the Jalaali (Jalali) calendar, if you stick to the current name,
then you have to change the calculations as well. Let me declare some points:




The calendar in use in Iran is locally called Hejrie Shamsi and not
Jalali. Jalali refers to the primitive solar calendar that was formally used in
Iran, which is totally different from the one that is being used right now. In
the other hand it is wrong to use the name Hejrie Shamsi in English.


The calendar in use in Iran is never called Jalali by the academic
authorities who arrange the calendar each year.


The original Jalali was never based on Hijra as year 1. It was solar but
not solar hijra, thus the era that the Jalali calendar refers to is other than that
of the current calendar in use.


In the Jalali calendar all the months have 30 days. The remaining 5 days
in the year (or 6 days in a leap year) will come after the 12th
month, whereas in the modern Persian calendar there are 6 months of 31 days
followed by 5 months of 30 days plus a month of 29 days (or 30 in a leap year).


Taking a look at the calendars that are in the System.Globalization
namespace: GregorianCalendar, ChineseLunarCalendar,
HebrewCalendar,
JapaneseCalendar,
JulianCalendar,
KoreanCalendar,
TaiwanCalendar,
you sense a culture or the region where the calendar is originated from or is
being used. Jalaali or Hejrie Shamsi make no sense in English, but the Persian
or the Iranian speak well of a culture.


You regularly see the Persian calendar or the Iranian calendar in the
English references. You see Jalali mostly in the Persian references.



Having the above in mind, Jalali
calendar is clearly not a proper name, even as a local name for Irans current
calendar. So for the English name there are only two choices: either the
Persian calendar or the Iranian calendar. I personally prefer to use Persian
Calendar since it keeps the culture while not limiting it to a specific
country. For example people of Tajikistan use this calendar as their second
calendar, and Afghans are considering switching their calendar system to that
of Iranians.



Regards,

Omid K. Rad

(NotHalfBuff)








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RE: A new Persian Unicode keyboard

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Well, [softening my throat] like Ehsan already mentioned, then
only trick is to use RTL paragraphs, and not only right-align the
paragraph.  That solves most of the problem.  For the remaining
few cases, these things called LRM and RLM should be used.

behdad


On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:

 The problem, as some of you might have guessed, is the direction switching.
 Given an application like MS Word, my keyboard correctly sends the
 characters, and Word gives them the right form. But sometimes some
 characters (mainly the shared chars), and often the blinking caret appear
 on the wrong side of the line.

 What can be done to make the shared characters (Like !) to appear on the
 correct side? The caret problem can be fixed with Word's RTL command. But
 mixing English and Persian letters in the same line often leads to
 unpredictable outcomes.
 The rule of the thumb is, use RTL paragraphs when writing Persian text
 (which might contain English text within it) and use LTR when writing
 English text (which might contain Persian text within it.)

 Is there an algorithm governing these situations that I can use to modify
 the output to remedy this?
 There is an algorithm called Unicode BiDirectional Algorithm, the details of
 which is avaibale on Unicode.org.  As you might have guessed, Word doesn't
 provide a correct implementation of this algorithm (nor do any other text
 editors that I know of to this date.)  There's a library being developed
 called FriBidi, of which Behdad is the project maintainer, IIRC, which might
 help you, but not with Word probably.  I guess Behdad would be able to make
 profound comments on this.
 -
 Ehsan Akhgari
 www.farda-tech.com http://www.farda-tech.com/
 List Owner:  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 MSVC@BeginThread.com
 [Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [WWW: http://www.beginthread.com/Ehsan ]


--behdad
http://behdad.org/
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RE: PersianComputing Digest, Vol 21, Issue 4

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Saied Nesbat wrote:

 This sounds like overkill, a roundabout way of doing that has
 to be done a lot simpler. Am I missing something? Since the
 Unicode characters have the information, should Word not at
 least act as a simple box?

Implementing the whole Unicode in Microsoft way means a lot of
code which results in a lot of binaries, so they simply can't
install them all 'just in case'.  You need to explicitly ask it
to install Arabic script support...

 Best regards,

 Saied

--behdad
http://behdad.org/
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