Re: OT: On computing, in Persian

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 01:54, C Bobroff wrote:
> BTW, what's with this new usage of replacing "Peh" with "Yeh." Do we not
> have enough Yeh problems as it is?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm seeing Peh's fine in the
article.

There is a chance that you are encountering a Tahoma's hinting bug that
drops the bottom Noghte of Peh in certain sizes. Are you seeing the
article in Tahoma? Do the Yeh's change back into Peh's if you resize the
document?

roozbeh


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Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft (fwd)

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 01:34, C Bobroff wrote:
> I have not been following the discussion very tightly, but I think that
> Mr. Everson misunderstood the context of the discussion. I can confirm
> that you are right. In linguistic circles "Perso-Arabic script" is used to
> refer to the modified Arabic script used in Iran to write Farsi (Persian).

I'm sure Michael Everson was *at least* talking about linguistic
circles. Unicode didn't exist in 19th century, so he could only be
talking about linguistic usage.

roozbeh


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Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 23:39, Ali A Khanban wrote:
> Well, that has the same author(!), so it doesn't count.

I believe national requirements of a government counts, whoever the
author.

roozbeh



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Re: Locale requirement of Persian in Iran, first public draft

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I don't know how you got to the page, but it is about the the Arabic
*language* in Iran. The (almost) correct Persian page is at:

http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en_US/?_=fa_IR

(which is done partially by me.)

roozbeh

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 05:01, Ali A. Khanban wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Have a look at:
> http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en_US/?_=ar&d_=en_US&_r=IR&;
> 
> Maybe we need to submit the draft version to correct this. Anyway, as 
> long as there is a note, it should be OK to refer to script as Arabic, 
> though I still prefer something like "Perso-Arabic".
> 
> Best
> -ali-
> 
> C Bobroff wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Ali A Khanban wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Well, that has the same author(!), so it doesn't count.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Do a google search for "pashto perso-arabic" to see that many authors
> >think Pashto is written in the Perso-Arabic script.
> >
> >Then do a google search for "pashto arabic script" and you'll see with
> >just a quick glance that most further explain that it is *modified* Arabic
> >script or called *Perso-Arabic.*
> >
> >If you're writing in English, you'd better not say simply "Arabic script."
> >
> >-Connie
> >  
> >

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Re: Personal names survey

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 00:32, C Bobroff wrote:
> I'm so glad you also now see that to *forbid* marking ezaafe in personal
> names is absurd.

Connie, Please! You really don't see the point? We are not documenting
practice in the locale spec, we are *specifying* a single way to do
things. People are very welcome to ignore the specification and do
whatever they like to do, if they don't claim they follow it.

roozbeh


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Re: khatt e Farsi

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 21:49, Peyman wrote:

> After resolving this issue, I try to go through the nice draft and
> give my suggestions if any.

We would appreciate suggestions, independent of whether this issue gets
resolved or not.

roozbeh


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Re: [Persian Locale d6 Feedback] Short Format Dates

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 2004-06-19 at 18:41, Hooman Mehr wrote:
> [...] The best solution in my opinion is to provide exact format strings (as 
> arrays of Unicode characters with specific placeholders for date 
> elements). This will avoid any possible ambiguity in the specification.

That will be specified in a coming appendix, which will have the locale
data for ICU and GNU C library.

Anyway, the situation is worse than what you may guess. The Unicode
Consortium has changed the bidirectional category of a few characters,
including Slash, in Unicode 4.0.1. For Slash and its brethren, it's not
just Neutral or things like that. We are having stuff like European
Terminators and Common Separators in the Unicode Bidi algorithm.

> I sincerely hope that you won't tell me that you expect the users to 
> type 1383 then / then 1 then / then 12 to enter a date in short format, 
> because it would be unnatural and none obvious (although currently it 
> may be the only way to get a correct result with the available software 
> applications).

I'm not implying anything about users here. We are specifying how the
final text should be displayed. We have not specified how to encode it
(of course that doesn't mean one is allowed to encode it however he
likes). If we do that, we may not remain conforming to Unicode if
Unicode changes yet another bidirectional category in a later version.

> As I have seen, you have defended going back to using the correct yeh 
> and correcting the faulty software/fonts, so I hope you choose the 
> right thing to do this time as well.

I always do the right thing, don't I? ;-)

> Alright I know, you may say: It is impossible any other way!  What is 
> the solution?

I say: the answer is too technical to be included in the locale
specification. There will be different answers for different situations,
in different contexts, or in different Unicode versions.

BTW, Behdad is attending the Unicode Consortium's Technical Committee
meeting right now, and later the ISO JTC1/SC2 ones. I'm sure the UTC
meeting (which will be the first with a FarsiWeb member present) will
have good news for us (which may include more changes and clarifications
to the Bidirectional algorithm).

roozbeh


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Re: Personal names survey

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 04:34, C Bobroff wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> 
> >  we are *specifying* a single way to do
> > things.
> 
> Why the 2 calendars then?

Behdad gave some reason. The other is: because there may be other
restrictions. So we are practically saying if you want to do it
vertical, do it this way, if you want to do it horizontal, do it that
way. If you don't care about horizontal or vertical, we will give you a
preferred way.

roozbeh


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Re: Khotot project needs update

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 09:08, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> --- Munzir Taha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Nadim, please update the pages to reflect the last changes:
> > 
> > For the farsifonts:
> > There is a 0.4 release at
> > http://www.farsiweb.info/font/farsifonts-0.4.zip
> 
> I have no means to know this and I'd requested we be told (via a private
> mail or a mail to Arabeyes' "general" list) when such releases do happen.

Well, me telling you the latest is 0.4 started that thread. I will
definitely keep you posted on new releases, but that, I had already
told.

roozbeh


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Re: [Persian Locale d6 Feedback] Short Format Dates

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Hooman,

There is this application called Unibook that may help you NOT write the
software for browsing the database. Depends on your needs of course:

http://www.unicode.org/unibook/

roozbeh

On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 06:38, Hooman Mehr wrote:
> Hi Behdad,
> 
> On Jun 26, 2004, at 1:50 AM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 
> >
> > I'm confused now.  What do you expect in PropList.txt about
> > U+060D?  If you read UCD.html, it says that files like
> > PropList.txt just list those code points that hold a true value
> > for the binary property.  Why they don't list the all??  Why
> > should the do?  There are more than a million of them, while
> > poins of interest are usually less than a thousand ones...
> >
> > behdad
> >
> You are right, that was my mistake. I had some wrong perceptions about 
> U+060D that made me believe it would belong there. I am starting to 
> feel I need to import all those data files into a database for quick 
> reference. I am getting tired of having to find information scattered 
> across so many different places (book, charts and various data files) I 
> still feel there should be a better way for organizing all the 
> information in Unicode.
> 
> - Hooman
> 
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Re: Persian UTF-8 MySql collation

[Roozbeh Pournader]

You can do proper Persian sorting using either glibc (available in all
GNU/Linux distributions), or ICU (available from
http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/). There is no other software known to
the community that does Persian Unicode software properly without using
either of those.

roozbeh

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 21:15, Peter Cruickshank wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I'm a new subscriber to the list, so please forgive me if I'm asking an old
> question. I did look at the archives for last few months though and didn't
> see any discussion of this issue:
> 
> The subject kind of explains it all - I'm part of a team adapting an open
> source MySql based content management system (Back-End - 
> www.back-end,org) to work with Persian content. A big stumbling block is
> getting UTF-8 collation working. We don't want to be reinventing wheels
> here - so it would be great to hear if someone has already built a UTF-8
> collation file and is willing to share it?
> 
> Any help or pointers will be greatly appreciated!
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Peter

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Re: Persian UTF-8 MySql collation

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 19:41, C Bobroff wrote:

> If you're talking about sorting, it was recently pointed out (see
> archives) that Windows server 2003 can sort Persian properly.

I would appreciate if someone can volunteer to run a test data set
FarsiWeb has on it. I'm 100% sure they won't support Hamzas or Harakat
properly.

roozbeh


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[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Farsi in Max OS X]]

[Roozbeh Pournader]

-Forwarded Message-
From: Michael Everson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Roozbeh Pournader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Farsi in Max OS X]
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:54:27 +0100

At 19:18 +0430 2004-07-06, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

Your friend could try AbiWord 2.1.2 for OS X
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14743

It is free and is multi-platform and OpenSource.

>-Forwarded Message-
>From: Kit Spence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Farsi in Max OS X
>Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 15:48:02 +0430
>
>I am doing some work in Afghanistan and would like to be able to
>generate content in Dari on my Mac laptop running OS 10.3.4  So far it
>appears that I cannot use Office X or Filemaker 5.5 and generate Dari
>due to those applications not supporting unicode fonts.
>
>Does anyone have any advice in this matter? If I upgrade to Filemaker
>7.7 and Office 2004, will those applications recognize unicode and will
>I require additional fonts?
>
>Thank you for any help that can be provided.
>
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Call for Participation: Coling Workshop on Arabic Script Languages

[Roozbeh Pournader]

   Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:22:46 -0700
   From: "Karine Megerdoomian" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Call for Participation: Coling Workshop on Arabic Script Languages


** Call for Participation **

COLING 2004 WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES

 Geneva, Switzerland, 23-27 August 2004
 Invited Speaker: Martin Kay (Stanford University)
  http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004



WORKSHOP THEME 

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the languages of the 
Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Pashto, Kurdish and Urdu. The usage 
of the Arabic script gives rise to certain issues that are common to all these 
languages despite their being of distinct language families. Hence, these languages 
share properties such as the absence of capitalization, right to left direction, lack 
of clear word boundaries, complex word structure, a high degree of ambiguity due to 
non-representation of short vowels in the writing system, and related encoding issues. 
Yet the research on these various languages have rarely been brought together in a 
single forum, and most development has been the result of initiatives by individual 
research establishments or industry firms. 

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for those involved in the development 
of NLP systems in Arabic script languages to exchange ideas, approaches and 
implementations of computational systems; to discuss the common challenges faced by 
all practitioners; and to assess the state of the art in the field. In addition, one 
of the aims of the workshop is to identify promising areas for future collaborative 
research in the development of NLP systems for Arabic script languages. 


WORKSHOP PROGRAM 

I. Opening and Overview
8:30-9:00 Computer Processing of Arabic Script-based Languages: Current State and 
Future Directions - Ali Farghaly 

II. Session 1: Lexicon and Corpora
9:00-9:30 Developing an Arabic Treebank: Methods, Guidelines, Procedures, and Tools - 
Mohamed Maamouri and Ann Bies 
9:30-10:00 Preliminary Lexical Framework for English-Arabic Semantic Resource 
Construction - Anne R. Diekema 
10:00-10:30 The Architecture of a Standard Arabic Lexical Database: Some Figures, 
Ratios, and Categories from the DIINAR.1 Source Program - Ramzi AbbÃs, Joseph Dichy 
and Mohamed Hassoun 

10:30-10:45 Break

III. Session 2: Morphology
10:45-11:15 Systematic Verb Stem Generation for Arabic - Jim Yaghi and Sane Yagi 
11:15-11:45 Issues in Arabic Orthography and Morphology Analysis - Tim Buckwalter 
11:45-12:15 Finite-State Morphological Analysis of Persian - Karine Megerdoomian 

12:15-2:00 Lunch & Demo Sessions

IV. Demonstrations 
Urdu Localization Project - Sarmad Hussain 
FarsiSum: A Persian Text Summarizer - Martin Hassel and Nima Mazdak 
Stemming the Qur'an - Naglaa Thabet 
Language Weaver Arabic->English MT - Daniel Marcu, Alex Fraser, William Wong and Kevin 
Knight 

V. Invited Speaker  
2:00-2:45 Arabic Script-Based Languages Deserve to be Studied Linguistically - Martin 
Kay 

VI. Session 3: Statistical Approaches
2:45-3:15 An Unsupervised Approach for Bootstrapping Arabic Sense Tagging - Mona T. 
Diab 
3:15-3:45 Automatic Arabic Document Categorization Based on the Naive Bayes Algorithm 
- Mohamed El Kourdi, Amine Bensaid and Tajje-eddine Rachidi 

3:45-4:00 Break

VII. Session 4: Speech Processing 
4:00-4:30 A Transcription Scheme for Languages Employing the Arabic Script Motivated 
by Speech Processing Applications - Shadi Ganjavi, Panayiotis G. Georgiou and 
Shrikanth Narayanan 
4:30-5:00 Automatic Diacritization of Arabic for Acoustic Modeling in Speech 
Recognition - Dimitra Vergyri and Katrin Kirchhoff 
5:00-5:30 Letter-to-Sound Conversion for Urdu Text-to-Speech System - Sarmad Hussain 

VIII. Discussion and Closing
5:30-6:00 Ali Farghaly and Karine Megerdoomian 

Accepted papers and formal demonstrations will be published in a proceedings volume, 
which will be made available at the workshop. 



WORKSHOP REGISTRATION 

For the workshops to take place, the COLING 2004 organizers require at least 20 
participants to register for the workshop. Speakers and participants are therefore 
asked to register via the official Coling 2004 website as soon as possible by visiting 
http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/. 

Workshop fees (in Swiss Francs): 
* Student early chf 90 
* Student late chf 120 
* Student on-site chf 150 
* Regular early chf 120 
* Regular late chf 150 
* Regular on-site chf 180 


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 
 
Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.) 
Karine Megerdoomian (Inxight Software and University of California, San Diego) 


PROGRAM COMMITTEE 

Jan W. Amtrup (Bowne Global Solutions) 
Tim Buckwalter (Linguistic Data Consortium) 
Miriam Butt (Konstanz University, Germany) 
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University) 
Joseph Dichy (Lyon University) 
Abdelkadir Fassi Fehri (Mo

Re: Bidirectional Layouts in Gtk+ -- Slides

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 05:18, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>  http://behdad.org/download/Presentations/bidi-layouts/

WOW! That is absolutely amazing. How was it received?

roozbeh


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Re: Linux teaching website

[Roozbeh Pournader]

BTW Ehsan, I consider this off-topic. This is about Persian support in
software and computers, software written to handle Persian text, etc.
This is not a list to gather volunteers for a website that happens to be
about an operating system and in Persian.

Not that I'm not personally interested, but only that it is off-topic.

roozbeh

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 10:18, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Is there any interest for a Persian website dedicated to teach Linux from
> the ground up?  I've been spending some time looking for Linux teaching
> websites on the net, and I've found a number of them.  Most of them have
> only contained a handful of Linux related tips, and there are a few which
> attempt in actually teaching Linux, but they don't have a good teaching
> program for getting beginners started -- All they provide is a teaching
> guide for a certain application or aspect of the system.  And there are
> several which are mostly dedicated to Linux discussions/news, which don't
> fall in this category.
> 
> Now, what I have in mind is this.  As a Persian user, one needs a Persian
> teaching resource which does not assume previous experience at all, and
> starts teaching Linux from the ground up; in a way that they can follow from
> Lesson 1 upward to start learning Linux.  And the whole teaching material
> will be free, both as in freedom and as in free "maa-oshaeer".  :-)
> 
> Do you guys think this is a good idea?  Do you have any idea about things to
> add, or exclude, maybe?
> 
> I also need help if anyone is willing/able to give.  I'm going to write up
> "Linux from command line" lesssons myself, which start from ls/cd commands
> up to more advanced command line tricks and shell programming methods, and
> then I might consider writiing about a graphical desktop, an application (or
> an app suite), or a specific task (like networking with Linux, for example.)
> But I think it would be very nice if several parallel topics can be started
> simultaneously.  But I don't have enough time for that myself, so I need
> help.  If anyone is able to write about such a topic from the ground up and
> on a lesson by lesson basis, I'd be grateful to have their help.  Also, if
> anyone is able to write Linux tips & tricks, then that would be nice as
> well.  Also, we can open up forums if some of you guys do the favor of
> answering questions there (since I won't have enough time...)
> 
> In case anyone decides to join, I think I would use MovableType as the
> publishing system, so it would be easy for anyone to get started writing
> articles.
> 
> Ideas/questions/comments/suggestions?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> -
> Ehsan Akhgari
> 
> Farda Technology (http://www.farda-tech.com/)
> 
> List Owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> [ Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
> [ WWW: http://www.beginthread.com/Ehsan ]
> 
> 
> 
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Re: Persian translation of GNOME

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I'll reply off-list.

roozbeh

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 22:44, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
> I'd like to help in translating the GNOME 2.8 po files.  I noticed that
> Roozbeh is the leader of the Persian translation team.  I'd like to know how
> I can contribute.  Should I send patches to Roozbeh himself, or do something
> else?  Also, are there any tools which can help in the translation (instead
> of manually editing the po files)?


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Re: Iranian clipart

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 11:44, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>   * Islamic Republic of Iran official emblem, based on the same
> specification, with a very slight modification to match the
> emblem in common usage:

Questions: What exactly is that slight modification? How is this
different from the emblem which was already provided on the FarsiWeb
website?

roozbeh


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Re: openoffice & zwnj

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 20:45, Mohammad Norouzi wrote:
> I have a big problem with typing farsi in the OpenOffice
> when I type zwnj some character like "|" appear that should not.
> Is there anyone who has the same problem or know the solution ??
> Is that a bug of oppenoffice ?

That's a famous bug that will happen in applications. KDE also had that
bug for quite a time until Behdad fixed it. The bug is because the
application or the rendering engine asks the font for a glyph for the
character, where it shouldn't. The application or the rendering engine
should not pass ZWNJ (and a few other "invisible" Unicode characters)
down.

I don't know if the bug is still present in latest versions of
OpenOffice.org, but it won't hurt checking and reporting the bug.
Please give me a URL to your bug report when you did it.

Roozbeh


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Re: It seems that kompare have problems in FC3 with UTF-8!

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 09:03, Hedayat Vatakhah wrote:
> ITNO GOD
> Hi everybody,
> Kompare is a useful program for me.

May I ask what is "Kompare" exactly?

roozbeh


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Re: FW: Re: Nesef Font

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 01:15 -0700, Soran M. wrote:
> Does you Nesf2 font support Kurdish letters also that are not part of the 
> Arabic/Farsi alphabet?

No.

> If not, do you have any plans to do so?  Do you have any fonts that support 
> all Kurdish letters and Farsi letters.

No, there is no plan to extend Nesf or Nesf2 by the FarsiWeb project in
any way, or fix its known bugs.

But it is among the long term goals of the FarsiWeb project to add
support for other Iranian languages (including Kurdish) to the
farsifonts package which currently only supports Persian and Arabic.

roozbeh


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The New Alef

[Roozbeh Pournader]

There has been a new Alef around for quite a while. For those who don't
live in Iran or haven't seen it yet for any reasons, a photo is
available at:

http://bamdad.org/~roozbeh/alef.jpg

It's used on car plates, but the exact usage is disputed among a few
friends of mine.

roozbeh


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Re: The New Alef

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 07:57 -0600, Connie Bobroff wrote:
> Quoting Roozbeh Pournader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> 
> > There has been a new Alef around for quite a while. 
> 
> Why do you say "new?" Alef is always written out that way as in
> "numbered lists," 

Umm..., because they connect the Alef to the Lam at the top and cut the
Feh short? I have never seen it like that in a numbered list.

roozbeh


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Re: The New Alef

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 20:29 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> > It's used on car plates, but the exact usage is disputed among a few
> > friends of mine.
> 
> What do you mean exactly?

That what kind of car plates used the Alef. The car plates which use it
are red usually, but appear without the marks that usually appeared on
cars with older red plates, which were governmental or public service or
something. They appear on cars which look like other cars in every way.

roozbeh


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Re: Persian Javascript Input under Firefox/Mozilla

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 02:36 -0600, Pooya Karimian wrote:
> I have put together a javascript code based on Roozbeh Pournader/Behdad
> Esfahbod code to emulate Persian keyboard layout under
> Mozilla/Firefox/Internet Explorer.

Ah, it was never my code. I don't know how much Behdad worked on it, but
the only part I really did was making the keyboard layout compatible
with ISIRI 2901.

> There are also some small changes in the keyboard layout based on Behnam
> Esfahbod's suggestions.

I would appreciate to know the details.

roozbeh


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Re: leap year issue with jalali

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 02:34 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> I don't know why Roozbeh
> likes to keep he buggy executable around.

No specific reason. Probably waiting for someone to submit a fixed
version of the Windows binary.

> Roozbeh, do you mind if I remove it?

No, I don't. But the best is trying to get someone fix the bug from the
C source and recompile. There are many Windows users out there.

roozbeh



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Re: Number display in Firefox

[Roozbeh Pournader]

This behavior is of course considered very bad practice, and is not
recommended in any standards. It would also limit one to be able to
display European numbers at all.

So, I would recommend not to turn on the feature, and nag to the
webadmins instead to use Persian digits in their Persian documents.

roozbeh

On Sun, 2005-03-27 at 21:31 +0430, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I just found something cool in Firefox which I had not come across 
> before, and thought some of you guys might not know it as well.  As far 
> as I can tell this is related to Gecko, so it must affect all Mozilla 
> based applications, though I have not tested it anywhere except Firefox 1.0.
> 
> The default rendering behavior for numbers appearing inside Persian text 
> in Mozilla is to show them as Latin digits (1 2 3 ...), though in IE it 
> depends on the context (whether the direction of the containing text is 
> rtl or ltr.)  To make Firefox respect the direction of the text in this 
> regard, you can add the following line to your user.js file:
> 
> user_pref("bidi.numeral", 1);
> 
> which sets the number rendering mode to "context."  This enables ASCII 
> digits entered inside Persian text to be rendered as Persian numbers (Û 
> Û Û ...)  Of course this does not affect the behavior of rendering 
> numbers explicitly entered using Unicode character codes.
> 
> FWIW,
> Ehsan
> 
> ___
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> PersianComputing@lists.sharif.edu
> http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing

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Re: ALL COMPUTER BOOKS IN THE WORLD

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Thanks for the notice. I removed the offending message from the
archives. Please make sure you don't quote the problematics parts in
your replies next time.

roozbeh


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Re: DocBook RTL document?

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 13:28 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> I have no idea what engine they are using to produce PS or PDF.

Well, "xmlto" uses TeX for that. Sebastian Rahtz's PassiveTeX, IIRC.

roozbeh


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Re: Mathematics in Persian, feedback needed

[Roozbeh Pournader]

About "tg" vs "tan": for a while, "tg", "cotg", and "cosec" were used.
Then the academic community switched to "tan", "cot", and "csc" but the
high school trigonometry textbooks remained with "tg" and family. After
a while, the high school textbooks also switched. Now the common form
used in all levels of education is "tan" and family.

About the stretched limit: High schools used that Persian stretched
limit (Heh, Dal) when I was in high school, but the official textbooks
now use the Latin "lim" (I just confirmed this with a high school
student who checked with his textbook). The academic community have
often used "lim".

Roozbeh


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Re: Mathematics in Persian, feedback needed

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 18:33 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> About "tg" vs "tan": for a while, "tg", "cotg", and "cosec" were used.
> Then the academic community switched to "tan", "cot", and "csc" but the
> high school trigonometry textbooks remained with "tg" and family. After
> a while, the high school textbooks also switched. Now the common form
> used in all levels of education is "tan" and family.

Ah, something else. When the "tg" and family were the default, all such
trigonometric operators were typeset in italic type, not roman.

roozbeh


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Re: siâh and giâh

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 21:51 +0200, Jalal Maleki wrote:
> The two most common diphthongs in Persian are ey and ow like
> in Peyman, peyk, nowruz, Mowlavi, and so on.

Well, not every expert agrees that "ey" is a diphthong. It's a
controversial issue.

> I can put my question in a different way: does giâh have two
> syllables or just one?

This may have the same situation. Some linguists may say is a diphthong
and hence one syllable, while others may say this is two syllables.

BTW, This list is mostly about computing-related aspects of the Persian
language, and members are usually more of technical background than
linguistic background. Linguistic discussions will probably not get
anywhere here, and are off-topic IMHO.

Roozbeh


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Re: Persian POS Tagger

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 07:50 -0800, Fahimeh Raja wrote:
> We are a group working on Persian POS tagger in university of Tehran.
> I am sending this email to know if anybody can help us in this field. 

Just out of curiosity:
Where in the University of Tehran are you working on that, and which
faculty member are you working under?

Roozbeh



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Re: Similar Unicode characters

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 09:19 +0330, Mohsen Saboorian wrote:

> Is there any other similarities (mainly about Arabic letters) in other
> languages: e.g. Urdu.

Yes, both Pashto and Urdu have such problems. They both use the Persian
Kaf (KEHEH), and Pashto uses both the the Arabic Yeh (YEH) and the
Persian Yeh (FARSI YEH). Urdu also has an alternative Yeh, YEH BARREE,
while Pashto has two additional Yehs, making the number of different
Yehs used in the language four or five (depending on if you count the
YEH WITH HAMZA or not.) Their situation is worse than Persian, since:

1) Higher level Urdu computing experts are somehow undecided about which
codes to use for Kaf.
2) Since Pashto uses both Persian and Arabic Yehs, which look the same
in medial form, different computing experts have come to different
conclusions about which code to use. See Everson and Pournader,
"Computer Locale Requirements for Afghanistan", p. 5, available from
http://evertype.com/standards/af/

The situation of Kurdish is also interesting, as most Iranian users use
the Persian Kaf (at least in typography), while most Iraqi users use the
Arabic Kaf.

Roozbeh


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[PersianComputing] Farsiweb.Info

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear friends,

Due to connection and bandwidth problems with Shabakieh Sharif, who has
been providing FarsiWeb's connection, we have moved our informational
website to SourceForge. We have also restructured some sections, and added
some parts that were announced on the mailing list, but were not linked
from the homepage.

The FarsiWeb site is now at:

http://www.farsiweb.info/

We will try our best to keep that URL and every URL we announce under that
domain as stable as possible. Any other URL will be unstable, and you
should not count on their availablity in the long run.

Please note that the web site is being restructured, and forgive any
possible problems (but please report them).

roozbeh

(BTW, I will not be reading my mailbox until February 2. You should try
contacting Behdad Esfahbod at [EMAIL PROTECTED] in case of urgent matters
related to the project.)

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Re: [PersianComputing] RE: PersianComputing digest, Vol 1 #37 - 1msg

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Mr Redhat wrote:

> I can't open the site!!!

which site?

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[PersianComputing] Internationalized Domain Names

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear all,

Sorry to mention this so late, but the Internationalized Domain Names
Working Group documents are in final call, so if you have comments to make
on them, now is the time. Visit http://www.i-d-n.net/ and subscribe to
their mailing list (and read their archives) before doing so. (Or feel 
free to send them to me for cleaning and forwarding.)

The documents in last call are:

1. Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-idna-06.txt

2. Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Host Names
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-nameprep-07.txt

3. Punycode version 0.3.3
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-punycode-00.txt

4. Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-stringprep-00.txt

and the last call will end on Feb 11th 2002, 23h59m GMT-5. There is little
time left.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Jalali for Palm

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Behdad just gave me his port of Jalali (calendar conversion) to
Palm OS 4[*]. You can download the executable at:

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/Jalali.prc

and its sources at:

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/Jalali-PalmOS4.tar.gz

BTW, I just found that you should not try the algorithm on dates before 
1750 or after 2250. The algorithm for Jalali date systems is much much 
more complex than we were thinking at the beginning. The famous 33 year 
cycle we had learned at school is only an approximation. The real cycle is 
2820 years! Just take a look yourself:

   http://www.angelfire.com/co4/couprie/calmath/persian/index.html

roozbeh

* I'm sorry I don't know which models of Palm handhelds support Palm OS 4:
  Behdad has an m505 and it does. It would be great if someone tells me so 
  I can list them at FarsiWeb's homepage.

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nesf font

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, My Mazgoon wrote:

> Question about nesf font supporting the Persian unicode.
> 
> Some charcters like Hamze (over vav or alef) is not being displayed 
> correctly and it will show as a rectangle. Is there any tricks displaying it 
> correctly?

No, the fonts is still buggy, and we lack the development resources to
complete it.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] FontLab 4

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear friends,

I would like to ask for your kind help to get our hand on a copy of a full
version of "FontLab 4", which we seriously need to continue our font
development efforts in the FarsiWeb project. You can find further 
information about FontLab at:

http://www.fontlab.com/html/fontlab.html

Our efforts on the famous Nesf font and also the Parsa font collection,
which we have started, have reached a dead end because of not having
access to adequate font tools, and the need to develop all the tools
ourselves. We need to complete and standardize the fonts, and then submit
them to different software vendors (both inside and outside the country,
ranging from Microsoft to Red Hat) for free distribution.

We would definitely accept any kind of donation to help us in the matter.
Please email me personally if you think you can help. (Even if you think
you manage to find an illegal copy for us, or buy the software yourself
and send us a copy.)

Thank you very much,

Roozbeh Pournader,
The FarsiWeb Project Group

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[PersianComputing] FontLab: Thanks a lot

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear friends,

When we sent the request message, we did not have a clue about how many
great and supportive friends we have. In such a short time, we have
already received a very kind offer of paying for the software and
delivering it to us; and also three warez copies. And guess what: we are
already running the software!

Thank you very much for all your kind support,

Roozbeh and the FarsiWeb Project Group

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[PersianComputing] Mehrsoft TrayLayout

[Roozbeh Pournader]

This is to announce Mehrsoft TrayLayout, a Persian keyboard layout
management program for Windows 2000 and XP, kindly provided by Arash
Rezaiizadeh. The software is provided "as is", without any support from
the FarsiWeb project. You are allowed to distribute and use it freely. It 
is available from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/traylayout-1.1.zip

Please note that this is not a FarsiWeb software. We are only releasing it
because of its extreme usefulness, even though its not Free Software. It
is also noteworthy that the default keyboard layout provided with the
program is not standard.

Thanks again Arash,

Roozbeh and the FarsiWeb Project Group

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[PersianComputing] Draft 5 of Persian Unicode

[Roozbeh Pournader]

We just finished the fifth draft of "Information Technology -- Persian
Information Interchange and Display, Based on Unicode". This is the draft
which we will discuss at the national standards meeting this Sunday,
March 10.

It is available in PostScript at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/draft5.ps.gz

and in PDF at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/draft5.pdf

(I was finally able to create a good-looking PDF from FarsiTeX.)

Enjoy, and don't forget to send us (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) your comments.  
Even if we cannot put your suggested changes in the text, we can put them
in amendments that will be published later.

Roozbeh Pournader,
for the FarsiWeb Project Group

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[PersianComputing] ICANN at Large

[Roozbeh Pournader]

For those interested in ICANN matters, there is an
online community at:

http://www.icannatlarge.com/

I recommend signing up as a member if you hold a domain name or are 
interested in domain name policy and administrative matters.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Opting out

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Just to mention that I have unsubscribed from some of international
mailing lists related to I18n, so I may not be able to monitor all
discussions there. It would be great if interested people here can
subscribe to some of them and tell the related Iranian list (farsiweb,
persiancomputing, linuxiran, farsikde) if they came to something important
(or even forward the email to me, if you think I can provide a useful
comment). The current list is:

 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Translations for Red Hat)

 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (I18n for development version of 
   Mandrake)

 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tavultesoft Keyman for making keyboard 
   layouts)
 
 * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (MathML in Mozilla)

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Mehrsoft TrayLayout 1.2

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear friends,

This is to announce version 1.2 of Mehrsoft TrayLayout, a Persian
keyboard layout management program for Windows 2000 and XP, kindly
provided by Arash Rezaiizadeh. The software is provided "as is", without
any support from the FarsiWeb project. You are allowed to distribute and
use it freely. It is available from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/traylayout-1.2.zip

Please note that this is not a FarsiWeb software. We are only releasing it
because of its extreme usefulness, even though its not Free Software. It
is also noteworthy that the default keyboard layout provided with the
program is NOT standard.

Quoting Arash, the changes are:

- Added: Farsi shape of digits.
- Bug Fix: prevent to eat space key on Check boxes and Radio 
  buttons, when in Farsi mode.

Thanks again Arash,

Roozbeh and the FarsiWeb Project Group

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[PersianComputing] UniPad with Persian support

[Roozbeh Pournader]

FYI.

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 08:19:43 GMT
From: Djamshid Sharmahd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: UniPad and www.farsiweb.info

Dooste gerami,

Jahate etela'e shoma^ narmafza^re UniPad ke yek "Unicode Plain Text
Editor" ast, ba^ negareshe 0.98 khod az zabaane Farsi postiba^ni
mikonad.
In narmafza^r dar nega^reshha^ye zire 1.0 bara^ye hame a^za^d (FREE) 
ast va ba^ versione 1.0 bara^ye estefa^dehe gheyre teja^ri (private
use) a^za^d ast.

UniPad bara^ye Windows 9x, Me, 2000, XP neveshte shodeh ast, va
ehtia^ji be nasbe "font" nada^rad.

Keyboard "Persian ISIRI 2901" va "Persian Negarestan" mojood ast va
mitava^n keyboarde delkhoh ra^ niz dorost kard.

Import wa exporte ISIRI-3342 niz mojood ast.

Baghiehe etela^'t dar:
Web http://www.unipad.org
Download http://www.unipad.org/download
Featuers: http://www.unipad.org/techinfo

ba dorood
dj. sharmahd
   
--
Djamshid Sharmahd
Sharmahd California Inc.
1250 G. Street, San Diego CA 92021, USA
Phone: +1-530-698 7873, Fax: +1-530-698 7873
http://www.sharmahd.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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[PersianComputing] Persian Information Interchange Standard

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Dear friends,

We have just published the final version of the national standard "Persian
Information Interchange and Display Method, Based on Unicode" which was
approved by the National Standards Committee in its two meetings on
March 10 and May 8, 2002 (19 Esfand 1380 and 18 Ordibehesht 1381). The 
text is available at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/finaldraft.pdf

and

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/finaldraft.ps.gz

(Please note that the above URLs are not direct links, but will direct 
you to a page for downloading the files.)

This version includes all the changes requested by the Committee, and is
technically final. We will only be able to make minor editorial changes.
We will send this to the ISIRI, the national standards body, this
Wednesday, in order to get printed. So please send us your final comments
before May 21, 23:00 IRDT (18:30 GMT).

The comments should preferably be sent to The FarsiWeb Project Group at:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

or the FarsiWeb mailing list at:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

The FarsiWeb Projects Group
Roozbeh Pournader, Behdad Esfahbod, Omid Milani

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[PersianComputing] Comments Closing

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Just to mention that I'm finalizing the text of the standard in an hour. 
So please send any remaining comments to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> as soon as 
possible.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Final Final version, and a Guessing Contest

[Roozbeh Pournader]

The version we sent for printing this morning, is at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/finalversion.pdf
and
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/finalversion.ps.gz

There are only very minor editorial or typographic changes from the 
draft we announced a few days ago. Let's hope this to be the ultimate 
version.

We still don't know the ISIRI number, but I guess it will be something
between ISIRI 5900 and ISIRI 6100.

I will hold a contest for guessing the number. In order to participate,
you need to be a member of the FarsiWeb or PersianComputing mailing lists
at the time I'm sending this. You can have only one guess: entries with
different guesses will be removed. The closest guess will receive a copy
of the standard, signed by members of the Technical Committee.

The deadline for entering the contest is the time we are told by ISIRI
about the exact number. You can use any kind of information from any 
source to participate in the contest. ISIRI's website may be start point 
for many:

http://www.isiri.org/

To participate, just send me ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) an email with an exact
subject line of 'ISIRI Contest', with three lines of information in the
text, first the guess, then the email address with which you are
subscribed to the lists, and finally your name in English. My own entry
may be something like:

   6000
   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   Roozbeh Pournader

Have fun,
roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Re: [farsiweb]Farsi heh + hamzeh

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> I hope that the FarsiWeb 
> development team are listening, and will give this suggestion serious 
> consideration.

We're listening, and reading all the debate. I will summarize all after 
all dust settles, and write down our standpoint. ;)

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Re: [farsiweb]Re: Farsi

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 30 May 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> There are some people in the Persian IT and linguistics debate who think 
> that they have a duty to lay down rules for other people to follow. At first 
> we were told how to write the . Now we have been told how to write 
> the . Next I expect we will be told how to combe our hair. Such 
> people should go and offer themselves up as a candidate for the  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

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[PersianComputing] Re: [farsiweb]Farsi and Arabic typography with hamzeh

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Ok, it seems that we are seeing a lot of monolouges here. Just tell me
when it finished, so I can tell you again the only reason why we should
not use the U+06C0 character for encoding Persian text. It's about
something named 'normalization', as I already told. You will have two ways
to encode the same text, with no considerations for them being equivalent
(unlike Vav+Hamze). If you want something official from the Unicode
Consortium, wait a while: it will be passed in the next Unicode Technical
Committee meeting, and they will remove the mention of "Persian" from the
description of the character in Unicode charts.

roozbeh

On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> 
> 
> The implementation of the  in the Farsi and Arabic typography 
> presents certain difficulties, because its vertical (and horizontal) 
> distance varies depending on where it is positioned in the text. It can be 
> positioned vertically anywhere above or below the , and a wide range 
> of distances in between. Its horizontal distance can also vary widely 
> because the width of the characters on which it can be positioned can vary, 
> as well as its location on the characters. For these reasons it is very 
> difficult to create a font with a single  which can be correctly 
> positioned on any location required. In the new OpenType font standard it 
> does provide sophisticated techniques to enable you to do that, but with the 
> older TrueType and PostScript fonts that is very difficult, if not 
> impossible. For these reasons the most efficient way to generate these 
> characters is in the form of ligatures, or better still, as individual 
> Unicode glyphs. As it turns out, Unicode does indeed recognise each of these 
> shapes as individually coded glyphs, so there is no problem. The only 
> exception to this rule seems to be the Farsi . But that is not 
> the fault of Unicode. It is up to the Iranians to ensure that their language 
> is properly represented in Unicode.
> 
> In the in the final version of the Persian IT standard published on the 
> Internet, it is suggested that this shape can be typed by typing the 
> individual characters  followed by the . There are two reasons 
> why that is not the best solution. The first is the one given above. The 
> second is the fact that this shape is so common in Farsi that it is more 
> economical to be able to type it with one keystroke rather than two. A 
> better solution is either to represent it as a ligature, or better still, to 
> ensure that it is recognised in Unicode as an independent glyph with a 
> unique code value. It also means that it should be supported in the Farsi 
> keyboard standard by being assigned an independent key.
> 
> Unicode is not interested in the meanings given to a character in a given 
> language. It is only interested in their physical representation. It is up 
> to the individual languages to interpret each character according to the 
> rules of each language. In Farsi, a  placed above a  has very 
> different significance than one placed above . But to Unicode it is 
> just .
> 
> Abi
> 
> 
> 
> _
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
> 
> ___
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> 


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[PersianComputing] Re: [farsiweb]Farsi and Arabic typography with hamzeh

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> In my previous message I had not said anything about U+06C0 or 
> “normalisation”. It had nothing to do with that. I don’t know where you got 
> that idea from. Perhaps you should go back and read it again, and come up 
> with a more sensible reply.

You did not say anything about Normalization. That's more than correct.  
But the only reason for not allowing U+06C0 in the standard, is its
cannonical decomposition. That weighs down all other reasoning. BTW, I got
the idea from Unicode. Where else? ;)

You may be correct in all your reasoning, but we are not talking about
technology available at the minute, or using all of one's options, or even
keyboards that can't generate two characters for a single key. We are
talking about interoperable text processing.

> If these exchanges look like a “monologue” (or perhaps a “dialogue”), 
> perhaps that is because not many people have registered on this mailing 
> list, or if they have, they choose not to participate.

They looked liked monologues, because people did not reply to each other 
case by case. They posted them like announcements. (I don't have anything 
to tell about participation. There are many subscribers that have talked 
at the right moment, and there are many others who are just interested in
listening.)

> I am not going to “finish”. You finish! If you want me to “finish”, you will 
> have to shut down your mailing list; and judging by the amount of 
> participation taking place on in it, it probably wouldn’t do any harm if you 
> did. Running a one-man show!

I didn't ask you to finish. I asked you to tell me when you had done all 
your reasoning, and there is nothing else remaining on the issue. "When 
the dust settles" should have been the proper phrase.

> I suggest you read my messages more carefully in the future if you intend to 
> reply to them. I don’t know what you are talking about.

I have read all your posts, and I think they should have been 
informational for some of the subscribers. But I am mainly talking about:

http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsiweb/2002-May/000266.html

Which I replied with:

http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsiweb/2002-May/000267.html

and again:

http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsiweb/2002-June/000276.html

You did not reply to any of them. Would you please reply?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] FARSI HEH WITH HAMZA

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> [...] Mr. Pournader had mentioned that he would summarize the discussion
> points,

Unfortunately I can't do that, since the discussions did not converge.

> and even try to reach a consensus/decision.

Again, I can't base any decision based on the discussions, since there was 
nothing about the reason behind the phrase in the ISIRI standard. The 
reason, can be found here:

http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsiweb/2002-June/thread.html#start

(Read the thread with Heh+Yeh as the subject)

> I know from my perspective, backward compatibility is very important.

Unicode broke a little of that backward compatiblity in Unicode 3.0.

> I am also wondering if the decision by the "experts", was based on
> perhaps guidlines from Farsi Linguists in Iran?

Yes. See

http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsiweb/2002-June/000276.html

> I have been 
> surfing various Farsi sites, such as Iranian newspapers, 
> and have not seen anyone using the proposed format for 
> HEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE (HEH + YEH).

No Heh+Yeh is proposed in the ISIRI standard. Just that if you want to
encode "Heh with Hamza above" aka "Heh with Small Yeh above" in your text,
you should not use the U+06C0 character, but a sequence of two characters
U+0657, U+0654.

> however, I can see that if the IT standards are not 
> consistent with the linguistic standards, we will always 
> have to have these discussion as why the difference in 
> the standards.

They are consistent. We have tried our best to make sure everyone can 
encode their text without problems and consistently. We have not forced 
any linguistic rules in the text of the standard.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: [farsiweb]Re: FARSI HEH WITH HAMZA

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> >Whats the policy to identify a list member as spammer? ;-)
> 
> What's the policy to identify a list member as intolrant? :-0

[speaking personally]

Abi,

You have acted offensive in some way or the other (but we will
forgive you for that), and are repeating yourself. I don't know about the
others, but the time I can save from getting into debates with you (or
even reading your emails) can be put into some other things, which will be
more productive for Persian support in many standards or pieces of
software.

First, You have not been able to convince me of anything about the Heh+Yeh
matter. Second, I have not learned anything new from your comments (I
already knew about all the facts). So, I will not do anything technical
based on your comments.

I wish to ask you the reason behind continuing the debate. If it is:

   1) You want to convince the committee that they have not considered the
   matter thoroughly, and they need to consider the matter again.

(About this, take my word that you can't convince them unless you raise
some new idea. You had not been able to raise anything new in your posts.)

Or it is:

   2) You want to convince the mailing list members that the committee is 
   not responsive, is not suited for the job, or that standard is a 
   bad standard.

Or is it something else?

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Re: FARSI HEH WITH HAMZA

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Abi Lover wrote:

> [...] The ýexperiences of Connie, who has posted severa messages on this
> mailing list, and ýexpressed his frustrations at not being able to spell
> the character properly in ýUnicode compliant software and fonts, such as
> Microsoft's Times New Roman, ýdemonstrates how that can hapepen.

Microsoft's Times New Roman is Unicode compliant, but simply does not
support some characters or scripts properly. It also has many bugs for
Persian.

That is the exact *current* situation of some font. This does not have any
relations to standardization. We should not standardize things based on
current support available support in a specific system.

BTW, if you have the time, install Red Hat 7.3. You can type Persian in 
some of the KDE programs, and it supports Hamza Above in some of the 
preinstalled fonts. No need to install anything additional.

> Even Microsoft recognises the need to identify this glyph as a separate 
> ýcharacter in the Farsi character set.

Microsoft does not have a Farsi character set, but just a Farsi keyboard.

> If you take a look at their Farsi keyboard ýon their Web site, you will
> find that it has a separate key assigned to . But
> it maps to U+06C0! They probably don't know that this ýcharacter is not
> compatible with the Farsi script.

They know, but they don't pay enough attention, simply since they don't
have enough market. Both me and Arash Rezaiizadeh have nagged to their
developers continuously about their bugs and problems, and they only fix
some of them if they don't forget it.

As a famous example, we have been nagging and asking them to fix an
obvious bug in their Farsi Yeh support just a few days after they released
IE 5.0 (the first effort was reporting the bug through their Technical
Support web page). But even with the latest release of Windows XP service
packs, some of their fonts remain buggy.

> But the trouble is that if ýthey removed this mapping from their
> keyboard, they would have no alternative ýUnicode character to map it
> to, because the character does not exist in the ýUnicode standard.ý

They should have HAMZA ABOVE on their keyboard instead, as we have told 
them many times.

> but there is no denying that the ýcharacter needs to be at least
> represented in the official Farsi keyboard,

I don't agree. Do you know any Persian pre-Unicode software developed in
Iran who has it on the keyboard? It is only Microsoft that has mistakenly
put it on the keyboard. "Lam+Alef" is also common in Persian, or even
"Meem+Yeh". Do you want a key for those?

> and ýif necessary mapped to a ligature representing the shape, and font
> designers ýshould be encouraged to add such a ligature to their fonts.ý

Ligatures are responsiblities of fonts. They have no relation to
keyboards. If you want a "Lam+Alef" on your keyboard, the keyboard driver
should generate two character for that key, and then the layout engine 
should merge them again to get the ligature.

About font designers, we are not even planning to standardize anything for
them. We are not in such a position. We can only provide advice to them
(as we are currently doing).

> It seems to me utterly illogical that characters such as  above> or ýý etc., all of which are essentially "Arabic" 
> characters, ýshould all be represented, and have separate keys assigned to 
> them in what is ýafter all the official PERSIAN keyboard, simply because the 
> ARABS have had the ýgood sense to ensure that THEIR language has been 
> correctly represented in the ýUnicode standard; but , which is 
> uniquely Farsi character, and is ýused more frequently in Farsi than all 
> those other characters combined, should ýbe omitted, simply because the 
> Iranians have not had the good sense to ensure ýtheir language is correctly 
> represented. I think that that is a bit of a ýdisgrace.ý

Oh! So it is just nationalistic talk? I'm not in the game anymore.

> I know from personal experience that the great majority of Farsi speakers 
> prefer ýto spell this character in it traditional form rather than in its 
> modern ýproposed variant

I completely agree. Users need Heh+HamzaAbove. So in all pieces of
software I have ever worked on, including FarsiTeX, I have tried my best
to get it in place. (It may be interesting for you that one of the reasons
our fonts are delayed, is finding some way to support the combination on
Windows 2000, which is based on Unicode 2.0 that lacks HAMZA ABOVE.)

Some other related note: I prefer using "Heh+ZWNJ+FarsiYeh" for {ezaafe}.  
That's my personal preference. Always, I type it: Heh, Shift+Space, Yeh.  
Actually four keys. And I put good time to make sure I have not missed a
single one in a document I have written. But will I ask for its inclusion
in a standard keyboard? No. Simplicity may be more important for a
keyboard layout. Also, the limited number of keys on the keyboard won't
let you do that.

> (4) It can be more efficient, if it is ýentered with one keystroke

[PersianComputing] ISIRI 2901 to Unicode map

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I just finished what should have done long ago, an informational mapping
table from ISIRI 2901 keyboard to Unicode. It's at:

http://www.farsiweb.info/table/2901-unicode.txt

-- 
Roozbeh Pournader   | Sometimes I forget to reply to emails.
Sharif University of Technology | Some other times I don't find the time.
roozbeh  sharif  edu   | So kindly remind me if it's important,
http://sina.sharif.edu/~roozbeh | and use other methods if it's urgent.

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Re: [PersianComputing] Internationalized browser

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, John Waters wrote:

> It just dawned on me! Try omniweb (www.omnigroup.com). I have been using
> Omniweb for years and years (since the NeXTStep days). They have an
> Internationalized web broswers. It's about 6 megs (dmg file).

Just to note that I remember hearing very good comments anout OmniWeb from 
one of the Unicode central experts, Michael Everson.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Microsoft no longer provides free fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I just found that Microsoft no longer provides its core TrueType fonts for
free. This creates some problems for those who download them for fixing
the Farsi Yeh bugs, or those who use them as basic fonts for their Linux
machines (either manually, or automatically for those using Debian).

The old page is at:

http://www.microsoft.com/opentype/fontpack/default.htm

roozbeh

-- 
Roozbeh Pournader   | Sometimes I forget to reply to emails.
Sharif University of Technology | Some other times I don't find the time.
roozbeh  sharif  edu   | So kindly remind me if it's important,
http://sina.sharif.edu/~roozbeh | and use other methods if it's urgent.

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[PersianComputing] Re: [LinuxIran]Re: [farsiweb]Microsoft no longer provides free fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Modirrousta, Mostafa wrote:

> Nos that we are on the subject, is there any Open-Font fondation, yet?

No, the best thing I know of, is:

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

and of course all the fonts already distributed with Linux distributions.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] ISIRI 6219:2002

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I was just notified of the ISIRI number of the Persian Information
Interchange standard we prepared. It is:

   ISIRI 6219:2002  Information Technology -- Persian Information 
   Interchange and Display Mechanism, using Unicode

I will keep you posted when I found it is available from ISIRI in paper
form.

The winner of the guessing contest is Arash Rezaiizadeh. He'll receive an
ISIRI copy of the standard signed by the technical committee, as soon as
we find an authoritative copy and can pass it to Mr Ali Asghar Khanban
(who is currently in England) for a signature!

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Creating TTF font with arabic codepage

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> How I can create TTF font with arabic codepage? 
> [...]
> I think, I don't use these utility correctly. Any one can help me!?

Well, since we are also tackling similar problems, my best advice would be
getting rid of that Fontographer+TTF tools and trying FontLab+VOLT. It
won't solve the problems with GSUB and multiple codepages completely, but
it will solve half of them.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] an idea

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Please post your thoughts. Let's see if there's any interest.

Just that I would really appreciate it, and that I can help in checking
the standard compliance of the test suite if it is small (and to the 
point) enough.

Connie, can you act as the maintainer/pusher/...? Or anybody else?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] NEWS FLASH concerning fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> I don't like to monopolize the group with my personal problems so much
> (although I hope I'm at least providing some entertainment!)

That's completely OK, IMHO. At least they are technical problems, not
theoretical (or evangelizing) ones. You are very polite, you are
interested in the matter, and you are completely on-topic. Ah! I was 
forgetting: you are also providing some entertainment.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: NEWS FLASH concerning fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> > like. Remember that wether you like it or not, and wether it was your
> > intention is not, you are now encouraging people to use specific products (
> > Like M$ IE ), that not everyone wants/likes to use. You are unintentionally
> > taking freedom from people, and this is a pretty big issue IMO.
> 
> You are absolutely correct on this. I will do my best to educate myself to
> do better in the future.

I don't agree with Aryan. He has a wrong concept of freedom. You are
providing content, and by this you are helping interested browser
developers to make their products Persian-enabled. Aryan has the freedom
to choose whatever browser he likes, and with the browser he has chosen
(Mozilla?), he even has the ability to help Persian support directly by
providing patches, bug reports, ... But instead, he's objecting (nagging?)
to people who are providing Persian content on Web.

Also, I don't see how are you asking people to drop their browser and
choose "M$ IE ". People decide about their own freedom.  You can't force
them to use something against their choice (you can see that by just
counting the number of people who are using the very out of date Netscape
Communicator 4). You can only give them more choice (free software
choices, for example), they will choose themselves.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: NEWS FLASH concerning fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> > I don't agree with Aryan. He has a wrong concept of freedom.
> 
> Aryan is perhaps thinking about the future.  I wanted to get some content
> up NOW. It is a rough question you have to face.

I understand, but my following points were also referring to the future.
He can help get his OS/browser/fonts fixed and standard-compliant and send
you a message like this: "Look, if you make your page this way, it is both
completely standard-compliant and rendered smoothly and properly with this
certain browser and fonts. Why don't you recommend this settings to your
users?"

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: NEWS FLASH concerning fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> He did what he could. One person has only so much time.

No point in getting into debates. OK. As you say. ;)

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: Re: NEWS FLASH concerning fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Aryan Ameri wrote:

> > I don't agree with Aryan. He has a wrong concept of freedom. You are
> > providing content, 
> [...]
> 
> Yeah, you are right roozbeh, sorry for my wrong approach toward freedom and 
> broswer compatibility

That's of course my personal opinion. No offense.

>  > Don't believe me too.  I was joking, I was just f***ing with
>  > Aryan
> 
> from time to time, I keep wondering what happened to you in India. I've heard 
> that india is a trange country, but I didn't think this much.

I hope you know the meaning of "f***ing with s.b.". kaamelan va daghighan
ya'ni "shookhi kardan", "dast endaakhtan".

I will write to you more in a private email.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Bidi in Yudit-2.7.beta1 (fwd)

[Roozbeh Pournader]

FYI

roozbeh

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 22:07:41 +0900 (JST)
From: Gaspar Sinai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Ken Beesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 Hugo Coolens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, S H A N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 Mark E. Shoulson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Roozbeh Pournader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 Mohamed kebdani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 Mohammed Elzubeir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Arabeyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
 Raphael Finkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Miikka-Markus Alhonen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Yudit-2.7.beta1

Hi,

A have added full bi-directional support to yudit-2.7.betas.

This will be released after a test period of bi-di and
after we have finished adding proper Tibetan and Lao support, which
was set back because of the BiDi changes. (A couple of weeks)

You can find the latest yudit-2.7.betaXX.tar.gz somwhere at:

  http://yudit.org/download.html

Current beta version is yudit-2.7.beta2.

In the current version the explicit bidi is totally reversable,
the text can be created from the view. The implicit bidi is
using the unicode algorithm.

Please look at this file to find out about the artifacts:

  http://yudit.org/download/Yudit.bidi.txt

Please bang on betas, but please keep down mail traffic by sending
me summaries only.

I expect some redrawing problems, but bidi itself should be just
fine.

I hope the buttons for document embedding and explicit bidi
will be intuitive - I do not have any time to write a any docs.

Cheers,

-- 
G̳á̳s̳p̳á̳r̳

ガーシュパール・Гашпар・가스팔・Γασπαρ・‮גאשפאר‬
ᏱᎦᏊ ᎣᏌᏂᏳ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎠᏓᏙᎵᎩ ᏂᎪᎯᎸᎢ ᎾᏍᏋ 
ᎤᏠᏯᏍᏗ ᏂᎯ.







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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Is this available online?

Sadly, no.

> I have been searching for some authority on good word-processing style
> such as where to use the ZWNJ.

That fascicle provides some guidelines, but many of the guidelines are far
from desirable or are very ambiguous.

> (Is it officially called faasileh-ye
> majaazi?? Who invented the term nim-faasileh?)

"nim-faasele" is a typographers' term. The official ISIRI 6219 term
(borrowed from ISIRI 3342) is "faasele-ye majaazi". There are also people 
suggesting "faasele-ye sefr".

> > outcome was wonderful, but the problem was there in words like
> > {zedde-aab}, or as in my original example {zedde-jaasoosi}.
> What was the problem? I should think the ZWNJ should be ok there or at
> least not act differently than your other examples.

I don't support Behdad's idea generally, but this is an explanation: Just
like when you were using a ZWNJ when putting the letters after each other
where not enough (like "khaane-haa" or "mi-ravad"), you should use this 
new space when ZWNJ is not enough. His "zedde-aab" is one example. There 
is a visual break between Dal and Alef, but he needs a little more spacing 
to show more separation. A full space would be out of question, of course.

> In fact, I have long been trying to figure out where you would use ZERO
> WIDTH JOINER in Persian. Can you please give an example of a real word
> where this would come up?

Yes, all abbreviations that use the letter Heh as the first letter of 
something. The famous example is the abbreviation "Heh, Dot, Qaf, Dot" 
that is used for "hejri-e ghamari". If you don't put a ZWJ after Heh, an 
isolated form (wrong) will be used instead of an initial form (right).

There are also cases the you may need to display, say, a medial Ain out of 
context. You can put a ZWJ on each side of your Ain.

> I've been having so many problems with spaces in Persian computing. Even
> little old   sometimes confuses my html editor and throws me into
> EN mode when I've often wondered if there's a Persian version of  

No, there's not. NBSP is a neutral multi-script character. That should be
a bug in your editor or OS.

> I'm not 100% sure I understand here but it sounds like you're trying to
> introduce *language reform* here rather than type Persian. If there are
> ambiguities in the written language, that may not be something the word
> processor should delve into, IMHO :)

I completely agree with you. Not a language reform in a high level, but a
very low-level orthography reform. The difference is not easily
recognizable by the herd, but it makes a big difference for text
processes.

> BTW, I noticed in later versions of Word they've gotten rid of ZWNJ and
> ZWJ in the special characters and now have "No-Width Optional Break" and
> "No-Width Non Break". Is this just a name change or what? They all seem to
> function in the same way. Any guesses as to why they've made this
> "improvement"?

They are just playing with names to try to help new users. Someone 
somewhere has guessed that the new names make more sense.

> then I finally found ZWNJ and could commence typing but what a
> nightmarish hell I had to go through!

How do you enter ZWNJ on your keyboard, BTW?

> I lost a lot of friends in the process!!

And acquired some new ones? ;)

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Oh. Too bad. Maybe we should make our own.

A previous member of FarsiWeb has done so personally. But I believe we
lack the authority to do that. We're just computer guys, not linguists.
One of the FarsiWeb's main guidelines is try to invent as little as
possible if some good-enough already exists. In case of orthographies,
this is a sharp edge. The Academy's recommendation is unsuitable even for
our internal use, although it is very good in some of the aspects. Both
supporting it and denouncing it are bad ideas.

> Was "faasele-ye majaazi" already a term used by the hordes? It has a
> poetic ring to it. Or did the people (person??) who developed ISIRI 3342
> make it up?

I guess the notion existed before that in the MacFarsi codepage (the first 
paper mentioning the idea goes to about 1980). But "faasele-ye majaazi" 
should have been invented by the ISIRI 3342 committee.

> > I don't support Behdad's idea generally,
>
> Why not? 

I believe the hassle is not worth it. I like to dream that in a long time
all competent Persian users will enter the same text in exactly the same
way if that's plain enough. Trying to educate the users about the new 
space, providing input methods in different situations, etc is very hard. 
Just consider the case of ZWNJ itself, which 

> If you've got a better idea, I'm all
> ears. Until then, I'm resigned to suffering.

For your situation, you should try Tavultesoft's Keyman which is at
. It has a Persian keymap with Shift+Space
producing ZWNJ and the backtick (`) producing ZWJ. It should work on all
Windows platforms.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> No! Only under extreme conditions I sometimes put a full space between
> "mi" and "konad" but that is only when desperate. I never can bring myself
> to type "mikonad" without any space.

If you want my advice, Never put a full space between "mi-" and what
follows it. It's horrible. If you can't enter ZWNJ, write it connected. It
has been written this way for a long time, at least, and I guess still
many oldies (!) write it this way.

Of course the advice doesn't apply to "khaane-haa" and such. But in that 
case even NBSP is preferable to a normal space.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> What is the point of academies and ZWNJ's existing if frustrated PC
> users don't know about them?

I completely agree. But why is't anyone else trying to scratch the itch?
Why are we the only prophets of the God of Typography on the Internet? I
still don't have a clue after more than six years of playing this game.

> Wow! Ancient history. Too bad nobody's documenting all this. It's
> interesting.

There was a special issue of "khabarnaame-ye anformaatik" by the same High
Council of Informatics we (FarsiWeb) represent in the Unicode Consortium
that provided a base for my works on Persian standardization. It was in
celebration of the publishing of ISIRI 3342, and included the text of the
standard itself, the text of the national 7-bit standard ISIRI 2900, and
many critical articles by sane and insane authors. It is probably that
issue you are missing. I can provide date and volume if you want to
contact HCI and ask a copy. My own copy is in a very bad situation after
being read and copied many times. It has more than 20 connected
components! ;)

> But otherwise you don't have anything against it? I'm dreaming of typing
> in Word and you type "mikonad" and a little red or green squiggly line
> appears letting you know you forgot something and the Office Assistant
> popping up asking to insert it for you!

If only the kind Microsoft would implement it, or listened to experts when
they finally would decide to implement it.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Because there is a shortage of Persian geeks in the world! 

Any ideas about how can that be changed?

> Although I wonder where the people publishing the literary magazines/books
> are getting their training?

There is usually a closed circle of (copy?) editors who learn their job
through master-apprentice relations. (I have had the honor to work with
two of the technically-oriented ones when I was working on the typography
side of the book "Mathematics Olymiad in Iran" seven years ago.)

> Ok, when you get around to it, post the publishing info.

It's "khabarnaame-ye anformaatik, nashrie-ye khabari-takhassosi-e
showraa-ye aali-e anformaatik-e keshvar, saal-e hashtom, shomaare-ye 1 va
2, ordibehesht va tir-e 1372, shomaare-ye mosalsal 53". It is labeled
"vizhe-ye estaandaard-e kod-e tabaadol-e ettelaa'aat-e faarsi". The
contact information for HCI can be found at .

> I'm sure they'll get around to it one day. Hopefully the "experts" will
> have a clue next time.  I have  a sneaking suspicion that they don't have
> anyone doing Persian typography on their staff.

They claim they even have Persian Quality Assurance staff!! One of my
contacts with them is also Iranian, and has been something like the head
of complex (Middle Eastern and Indic) scripts division of Windows for some
years.

> I'd put some info on ZWNJ on my Persian wordprocessing FAQ a long time
> ago. Now I will add some details I've picked up from this discussion (esp
> on ZWJ) and illustrate with some real text for folks who'd like to have
> some choice. I hope that'll be helpful and not cause too much damage.

Please post the URL here (and on FarsiWeb mailing list) after you did it.

> You all come out snorting, hee-hawing, and neighing when Saber posts a
> URL to a site requiring a password and forgets to provide the password
> or when there's a heh+hamzeh war.

Not really, I would have expected much more people to participate in the
Heh+Hamza war, since it was a very hot topic. Honestly, I was
dissappointed! ;)

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computingmade easy

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Have friendly discussions like this?? Raise general awareness??

Have been trying to do that for more than four years. No chance.

> > There is usually a closed circle of (copy?) editors who learn their job
> > through master-apprentice relations.
> Oh. Do they have their own special software?

They use Zarnegar or other typographically-oriented software. The editors
I worked with were using (and still use) TeX-e-Parsi. These products
rarely have a good import/export functionality (and you should forget
about Unicode).

> Don't worry. I'm replenishing the arsenals now! More entertainment soon!

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] ISIRI 6219:2002

[Roozbeh Pournader]

We just got our hand on the published copy of the Iranian National
Standard

  ISIRI 6219:2002  Information Technology -- Persian Information 
  Interchange and Display Mechanism, using Unicode

It is dated November 2002, and is about viii+33 pages.

The standard is mainly guidelines for encoding Persian texts in Unicode,
and tries to solve some of Unicode ambiguities in handling the Persian
language and the Arabic script locally.

An unofficial online version (which is exactly the standard minus its
cover) is available from:

   http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/farsitools/finalversion.pdf?download

A paper copy may be acquired at the price of 4125 IRR from:

  Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran
  PO Box 31585-163
  Karaj, IRAN
  Fax: +98 (261) 280-7045

Roozbeh Pournader,
for the FarsiWeb Project Group

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Could you please clarify? MS bought font(s) originally designed as
> freeware??

MS doesn't have exclusive right on Nazanin or Mitra. If you have not
acquired your copy of Nazanin from Microsoft or Monotype, they are talking
about another Nazanin. Please tell the MS guy about it.

> Does the first person who made Nazanin know about this?  I sort of
> imagined all these fonts were created in the 1980s out of some love of
> Persian computing with no plans for making any money.

Sinasoft doesn't claim any copyright on their old TTF fonts. That's the 
reason Borna Rayaneh could stamp its own copyright on their fonts. I know 
this from the discussions me and other HCI representatives have had with 
Sinasoft's CEO.

They may have possibly sold a copy of the font with some non-exclusive 
rights to Monotype. But that's unrelated.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Yudit-2.7

[Roozbeh Pournader]

FYI. Yudit now has bidi support and Persian keyboard. Unfortunately 
Shift+Space doesn't work for ZWNJ, so you need to use Shift+B.

roozbeh

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:41:37 +0900 (JST)
From: Gaspar Sinai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Yudit-2.7

Version 2.7 of the Unicode Text Editor Yudit has been released.

Download:

  http://www.yudit.org/download.html

Homepage:

  http://www.yudit.org/

BiDi Documentation:
--
  http://www.yudit.org/bidi/

Changes since version 2.6.4:
---

o  Added full Unicode compliant bidirectional text support
o  Added fallback to root xinput style if no suitable style is found
o  Received and added  Polish gui translations,  Persian.kmap, Sanskrit.kmap
   Inuktitut-ICI.kmap, Inuktitut-KBD.kmap, Chinese-Pinyin.kmap,
   Chinese-WB.kmap, ArmenianEastPhon.kmap
o  Speed Optimizations
o  OpenType GPOS support for composing characters
o  Better TAB control

Other Notes:
---
 Even if you can not read bidirectional scripts, it will be
 useful to type this in the editor command area:

  howto bidi

 to get some ideas what bidi is, and how it works in Yudit.
 Even if you can not read RL scripts, RL words will be indicated
 in yellow (the default RL color).

Enjoy!

Tokyo, 2002-11-23

-- 
G̳á̳s̳p̳á̳r̳
ガーシュパール・Гашпар・가스팔・Γασπαρ・גאשפאר
עברי 10-2*5

--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:  http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> > Sinasoft doesn't claim any copyright on their old TTF fonts.
> So Sinasoft made the first Nazanin, Mitra, etc?
> What is Linotype that the MS guy mentions?

So it's Linotype? I thought it's Monotype. They should have got their 
hands on the outlines somewhere in the process.

One point to raise is that the Nazanin we use is not *hinted*. Their 
Nazanin should be hinted. So our Nazanin is not based on theirs.

> > That's the
> > reason Borna Rayaneh could stamp its own copyright on their fonts.
> Even Borna is giving away for free after having made many improvements on
> the fonts.

Of course, but does Borna's copyright statement give you the right to 
modify them also?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> > One point to raise is that the Nazanin we use is not *hinted*. Their
> > Nazanin should be hinted. So our Nazanin is not based on theirs.
> I wish I knew what hinting is. No, never mind. I don't want to know.

It should be interesting for you. It is lack of hinting (or improper
hinting) that makes some fonts very ugly or unreadable in small sizes.  
It's good hinting that makes Tahoma the popular font it is.

> However, our Nazanin has a whole list of defects: could use a few more of
> the rarer glyphs (like dagger alif),

You mean Unicode's SUPERSCRIPT ALEF?

> But why did Microsoft even pay money for a ready-made font with so many
> defects? And why Nazanin? 

Monotype/Linotype Nazanin is supposed to be free of these defects. I
suggested Nazanin to Microsoft, after they were trying to license Mitra
from Monotype/Linotype. I also suggested Traffic. I don't know what may
have happened after that.

> And why did this guy tell me that the font has nothing to do with the
> diacritics break-up problem and that it was a browser problem? Can it
> really be possible he doesn't know that it DOES have to do with the font?

That was a bug in the our copy of the font. I don't know about the guy.

> But what if they on-purpose don't fix the diacritics problem so that the
> font won't work in non-IE browsers?

Who are you talking about here? Sinasoft? Borna? Microsoft? *type?

> What if I want to add dagger alif but can't because the new Nazanin MS
> is no longer freeware??

No, you won't be able to modify Microsoft's distributed Nazanin legally.  
But I guess it will hopefully include the dagger Alef.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> I see. But if all this was done more than a year ago, the font should be
> ready now. I hope we don't have to wait for WinXP's successor.

We do need to. They told me that it is not for XP, but for the next thing.

> No! View some text with diacritics with a standard core font like Times
> New Roman with some Gecko browser like NS 7.0. The diacritics chop up
> the words.

So that's a bug in Gecko. Simple!

> Fonts that chop up the words if you use diacritics: Sina, Microsoft and
> old Borna.

I'm sure nobody is intentionally breaking anything here.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> I will do some sleuthing and begging. Maybe they'll make an exception and
> release the font early.
> This is a desperate situation.

They need to sell it as part of something. That would be either the next 
Office, or the next Windows. The best place we can get is making that
IE 7.0. Better know what we are fighting for!

> But if Borna has figured out how to compensate for the bug, then the font
> could be made to be backwards compatible.

It may be the other way around, Borna may have dropped a feature out of 
the font which was a bug in Gecko and made it handle diacratices wrongly.

BTW, I am sure there are Borna people around.

> But maybe not intentionally fixing it. Especially if it's something
> technically simple. Of course, Microsoft is not the one who should be
> improving Gecko.

People like me and you are :) Do you have enough time to report a bug?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> They don't NEED to do anything. They can include it among their acts of
> charity!

Microsoft and charity? ;)

> >  The best place we can get is making that
> > IE 7.0.
> Newbie has not understood. Fonts don't come as part of the browser. They
> are on your harddrive. So what do you mean?

But new fonts may get installed when you install a new browser. That was 
the case with many Arabic fonts when one installs IE post-5.0 on his 
Windows 98. Tahoma, Arabic Traditional, Arabic Transparent, and 
Arabic-enabled Times, Arial and Courier.

> > It may be the other way around, Borna may have dropped a feature out of
> > the font which was a bug in Gecko and made it handle diacratices wrongly.
> LOL!

I'm not joking. That's a famous notion. Software Engineers call it being
"bug compatible".

> If you give me a URL, I'd be happy to report. But only from my IE. I don't
> have time to wait for pages to load in NS, and that's here on the campus
> ethernet. I can't imagine what it's like on dial-up.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided

Please put me on the CC field of the bug.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided
> ok, I had to create an account to submit the report. Didn't find anything
> concerning "arabic diacritics" in the bugs database so maybe I am the
> first to report. WHat category shall I put this in, "bidi Arabic Hebrew",
> "browser general"?? They don't have anything for fonts.

Put it in "Bidi Arabic Hebrew".

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

> Check this out:
> 
>http://www.fontexplorer.com/FontStore?URL=http://www.fontexplorer.com/isroot/FontStore/content/01_news/content/news_04b_fontfeat_arch/home_06b_fcomp_arabic_types/news_04a_arab_nazanin.html

That's interesting! This means that Linotype has designed Nazanin.

I should really contact the SinaSoft guy. I really hope SinaSoft's Nazanin
has been digitized from printed copies based on Linotype machines, or we
won't be able to distribute the font world-wide legally.

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Chimera Web Browser for MacOS X

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, john waters wrote:

> Hello gang,
>   Below is a URL demonstrating the capabilities of Chimera, an all 
> "cocoa" (formerly openstep) port of Mozilla to MacOS X.
> http://www.martnet.com/~johnny/chimera-ir.jpg

Wow. What a mix of sizes!

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Nazanin again, sorry :(

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote:

>   Why doesn't the Persian community get the money together and get a font
>   made?

That's also my question. Why?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Re: My radical discovery. Persian computing

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2002, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:

> The problem may be one of advertising. I doubt, for example, that
> any announcement about PersianComputing list has been sent to
> lists such as [EMAIL PROTECTED];  iran-news is the perfect
> place for such an announcement.

Would you please do that, Skip? You have the link for the mailing lists,
and the project's homepage.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Iran official holidays

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Searching Google, I couldn't find any list of Iranian holidays that is not
only for some certain year, and so I made one computer-processable one 
myself:

http://www.farsiweb.info/table/iran-holidays.txt

I'd appreciate any feedback, specially in correcting possible typos.

Roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] timezone data

[Roozbeh Pournader]

You may have noticed that Iran's daylight saving time has not been
implemented correctly in any operating system. The Linux implementation
was one day off, while the Windows implementation is about a week off.

Following, I am attaching an announcement of the latest version of
'tzdata' database that fixes that bug for all the libraries and operating
systems that use that database (almost all Unixes, I guess).

Please consider updating your servers or machines if you have the
expertise, or contacting your OS vendor to fix the problem in the next
release of their OS, or most preferably, in a patch to those currently in
use.

Please remember that the next timezone change of Iran will happen at the
end of Shahrivar, and that bug will affect 31 Shahrivar (September 22), a
Monday, and a business day in Iran.

Thanks,
Roozbeh

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 09:39:37 -0500
From: "Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "List Time Zone (E-mail)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: tzcode2003a.tar.gz and tzdata2003a.tar.gz
Resent-Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 09:40:18 -0500 (EST)
Resent-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

The files
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzcode2003a.tar.gz
and
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2003a.tar.gz
are now available. In addition to the changes circulated on the time zone
mailing list by Paul Eggert,
there are a few additions and modifications to the tz-art.htm file.

--ado

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[PersianComputing] Any kurdish expert?

[Roozbeh Pournader]

I was wondering if anyone here knows Kurdish and can read and write in
Kurdish in the Perso-Arabic script...

If you know, please contact me personally at my email address: 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.

Thanks,
Roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Unicode Advertisement

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Hong Kong [Special Administrative Region] government is advocating
ISO 10646 (a.k.a. Unicode) by creating flash animations:

http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/images/cli/iso.swf

Funny!

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] Unicode character names (was Re: Unicode Advertisement)

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sat, 5 Apr 2003, C Bobroff wrote:

> If unicode is so scrupulously attentive to details of standardization,
> why is the naming scheme so haphazard?

Because of very tight constraints set by ISO, 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.

> The names of the Arabic letters are based on their Arabic *colloquial*
> names (yeh instead of ya, heh instead of ha).

The naming system is here because of the need for backward compatibility.  
Actually, ISO defines two characters in two different standard character
sets to be the same thing if their name is exactly the same. So, all the
character names got inherited automatically from ISO 8859 series of
standards. ISO 8859-6 (Arabic/Latin) used those names (I don't know why),
so ISO 10646 and Unicode inherited them directly.

> For example, "Arabic letter Farsi Yeh". And the use of "Farsi" hasn't
> been fixed after all the learned debates??

Once again, the letter was named like that in some old ISO standard about
"extended" Arabic letters, and the name stuck.

ISO and Unicode Consortium both use "Persian" when they refer to the name
of the language. "Farsi" is sometimes used in the parentheses, to tell
those who don't know about the politics involved to know that these are
the same thing.

roozbeh

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[PersianComputing] New keyboard layout

[Roozbeh Pournader]

In a technical committee meeting for designing a new and extended standard
Unicode-based keyboard layout for Persian as used in Iran, based on the
national standard ISIRI 2901:1994, we agreed the following layout. We
appreciate any feedback either to the mailing lists, or to the FarsiWeb
Project Group's address at <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.

We did not consider the requirements of the popular minority languages of
Iran, most specifically Azeri (and other Turkic languages), Kurdish,
Balochi, and Luri. We appreciate the help of anyone who can help us in 
that.

Roozbeh,
for the FarsiWeb Project Group

--

Features of the layout:

1. Complete backward compatiblity with ISIRI 2901:1994, available from
. No single key is changed, only empty
positions are filled.

2. Specification based on the Unicode 4.0 repretoire, including Rial Sign
and Subscript Alef, various Unicode bidirectional control characters,

3. Usage of the AltGr (or right Alt) key for required-but-rarely-used 
characters.

4. Complete support for US ASCII punctioations, for entering rich text, 
such as XML and HTML.

5. Complete support for the character repretoire of ISIRI 6219:2002.

6. Complete support for quoting Arabic texts of Koran and Hadith.


Attached are two files, first a visual layout, and then a data file for 
Unicode code points assigned to the keys.

In the visual layout, the following control characters are not marked:

` (E00):   Zero Width Joiner
AltGr+9 (E09): Left-to-Right Mark
AltGr+0 (E10): Right-to-Left Mark
AltGr+I (D08): Left-to-Right Override
AltGr+O (D09): Right-to-Left Override
AltGr+P (D10): Pop Directional Formatting
AltGr+[ (D11): Left-to-Right Embedding
AltGr+] (D12): Right-to-Left Embedding
Shift+B (B05): Zero Width Non-Joiner
AltGr+B (B05): Zero Width Joiner
Space: Space
Shift+Space:   Zero Width Non-Joiner
AltGr+Space:   No-Break Space
<>TLDE200D00F7007E
E01 06F100210060
E02 06F2066C0040
E03 06F3066B0023
E04 06F4FDFC0024
E05 06F5066A0025
E06 06F600D7005E
E07 06F7060C0026
E08 06F8002A2022
E09 06F90029200E
E10 06F00028200F
E11 002D0640005F
E12 003D002B2212
D01 0636065200B0
D02 0635064C
D03 062B064D20AC
D04 0642064B
D05 0641064F
D06 063A0650
D07 0639064E
D08 06470651202D
D09 062E005D202E
D10 062D005B202C
D11 062C007D202A
D12 0686007B202B
C01 06340624
C02 06330626
C03 06CC064A0649
C04 06280625
C05 06440623
C06 062706220671
C07 062A0629
C08 064600BBFD3E
C09 064500ABFD3F
C10 06A9003A003B
C11 06AF061B0022
B01 06380643
B02 06370653
B03 06320698
B04 063106700656
B05 0630200C200D
B06 062F06540655
B07 067E06212026
B08 0648003E002C
B09 002E003C0027
B10 002F061F003F
BKSL005C007C2010
SPCE0020200C00A0
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Re: [PersianComputing] Shamsi Date

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Rezvan Dadashi wrote:

> Dear Roozbeh

Well, if you want me, email my personal address (well, I may not answer 
that fast, of course). I guess it will be a little offensive to some of 
the subscribers to do it like this.

> Do you have solution for "Shamsi" date format in Windows 2000/XP?

What do you mean by solution? If you want the code, some is available at 
the FarsiWeb homepage at  (search for 
"Jalali"). If you want something to install which then automagically turns 
your system into a system with dual Gregorian/Persian date support, I 
don't know any that's good enough.

roozbeh

PS: Houman Pournasseh, of Microsoft, has asked me to provide the algorithm 
to them, which I did, and he promised to get that implemented in the 
*next* version of Windows, whatever that is.

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[PersianComputing] [OT] Re: Congratulations to Sharif's

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Off-topic, of course. My comments below.

On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:

> > In a recent speech, the Chairman of the Department of Electrical
> > Engineering at Stanford declared the Sharif Technical University of
> > Iran the best undergraduate program in the world based on the
> > curriculum of studies and the quality of the graduating students.

Well, the quality was already there in the students when they entered
Sharif, IMHO. The best high school graduates from the whole country select
Sharif automatically, without thinking. It's evidently the best choice
available (or the only sane one?).

I can't tell much about the curriculum of studies generally (I'm not an
expert in education), but from the direction the things are going now in
Sharif's Computer Engineering Department, it's obvious to everybody (but
the professors themselves) that such a record won't be repeatable ever
unless they fire almost the whole staff (including the professors, of
course) and recruit new ones.

The Chair of Sharif's Computer Engineering Department has already
mentioned that "We don't want students interested in Theoretical Computer
Science in this department anymore, we prefer them to go the Mathematics
Department." He has also gone a long way to fire the best tutor in the
department, the wonderful Dr Tusserkani.

> > Congratulations to all SHARIFI'S

I should personally say "Thanks!" :)

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Persian input with US/European keyboard

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote:

> That's one of the problems with schemes like Eurofarsi mentioned earlier:
> once you put the short vowels, you commit yourself to one dialect but if
> you leave them out, you can maintain the universality of the Persian
> language.

I was talking to the new chair of the Persian Academy's "Language and
Computers" group the other day, and we were chatting about the previous
efforts to latinize the Persian script. We tried to look at the Turkish
language reform independent of its cultural and political aspects, but
only linguistically. He had a notion that the word "Meem-Heh-Meem-Dal" had
somehow become an ideograph in the Muslim countries, written the same way
from Turkey to Indonesia, but pronounced in at least five or six
completely different ways (Turks pronounce it as "Mehmet" for example). He
was mentioning that the Turks did the script switch and the
standardization of the pronounciation of the language at the same time.  
You can't do one without another. And it's the second one that is very
hard. Very few notice that they should do that also, when they suggest a
Latin orthography, so not a single one of them has ever come to any real
achivement. Everybody just uses his or her own personal pronounciation.

He also had a belief that if you want to look from the computing side, and
not the cultural one, it is exactly the orthography involved that is
keeping us behind (any maybe a script switch will help). We struggle over
the orthography, so a real application never arises. No one dares to
simplify the orthographic rules well enough to make them implementable, no
one risks creating a complete dictionary with solid orthographic
recommendations based on a previously finalized orthography, ...

There are some good news involved, of course, like a group working in the
Persian Academy to create a word list according to the official
orthography the Academy published recently. And there's a sad side to
story always: the official orthography is not of a good-enough quality,
the team has a very limited budget, and they are not even using a special
software to help them.

I promised to help them, but you know how bad I am in keeping these kind
of promises ;-)

Any volunteer residing in Iran (and has real experience in Persian
computing)?

roozbeh

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Re: [PersianComputing] Persian input with US/European keyboard

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Nigel Greenwood wrote:

> As a new member of this List, I find all the x-posting & cc'ing a bit 
> confusing.  Isn't it simpler if all postings go to PersianComputing?  Makes 
> replying a lot easier too!

There are reasons for this. Read the archives please.

> Only as a personal name.  The Prophet's name is pronounced Muhammed.

Where? In Turkey? If that is the case, it's different from the way it's 
pronounced in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

At least the way it is pronounced in Iran and Saudi Arabia is very
different. In Iran it is pronounced "mohammad". In Saudi Arabic it is
"muHammad".

> > He was mentioning that the Turks did the script switch and the
> > standardization of the pronunciation of the language at the same time.
> 
> I don't think the pron. of Turkish has been standardized, exactly.  It's just 
> that the orthography reflects educated Istanbul/Ankara speech.

That's it. The orthography reflects a (semi-)standard pronounciation.
There is no such thing for Persian (for example, Kabul's Persian is a lot
different from Tehran's Persian, in terms of pronounciation).

The point is: you need to choose a standard pronounciation if you want to
use the Latin script for the Persian language. And that's very hard. "The
Devil is in the details."

roozbeh

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

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Behnam Esfahbod wrote:

> As Roozbeh suggested, we can put these 3 character in the new layout, but 
> my opinion is that we don't; because they SHOULD NOT use in persian texts, 
> and we have other local shapes for these characters.

No, we don't local shapes for these. These characters are usually used for
their *legal* value. We don't have that notion of Trade Mark or Registered
Trade Mark here, and there is also no need in Iranian law to put a
Copyright symbol anywhere.

Some certain publishers, like "kaanoon-e parvaresh-e fekri", have invented 
a Copyright-like symbol and been using it some times, in the shape of an 
isolated Hah ("he-ye jim-i") inside a circle. But again, it is not 
standardized, and it has no meaning in any legal circle.

(And if anyone is wondering if we need to have that character in Unicode,
the answer is "no, we don't". The reason is left as an exercise to the 
reader!)

roozbeh

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