New beta release of Persian Fonts
A new beta version of FarsiWeb project's Persian fonts is now available. This contains various improvements to the original Koodak beta, and contains new fonts Roya (Normal and Bold), Titr, and Homa. According to our best knowledge, these are the first Unicode compliant versions of these fonts, and the first set of fonts ever to conform to the Iranian national standard ISIRI 6219. The fonts currently support the Persian and Arabic languages. This is a beta release and contains known bugs, so use the fonts at your own risk. But we appreciate bug reports or requests for enhancements. Bug reports should be sent to the email address [EMAIL PROTECTED]. (Please note that we cannot answer all the emails sent to the address.) You can download your copy from: http://www.farsiweb.info/font/farsifonts-0.2.zip The fonts are conforming to the Unicode, ISIRI 6219, and OpenType standards as much as possible (they will be made conforming to Adobe glyph naming standard in a later release). The support will increase in newer versions, which will contain more fonts, more glyphs, and most importantly, support for small sizes for selected fonts which make them suitable for web use. You can freely share and distribute all of the fonts, if you don't sell them directly, or change or rename them. Some of these fonts are licensed under the GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL), which will give you even more rights as a user and developer. For more details, see the license field of the fonts themselves, and the file COPYING or COPYING.txt in the zip file. Other kinds of licensing is also available from Sharif FarsiWeb Inc, which can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. The FarsiFonts project is sponsored by the High Council of Informatics of Iran (http://www.shci.ir/) and Sharif University of Technology (http://www.sharif.edu/). We wish to thank them for supporting standards and free software. I finally wish to thank Behnam Esfahbod, Elnaz Sarbar, and Behdad Esfahbod for their work on the fonts. This was impossible without their labors. Roozbeh Pournader, Sharif FarsiWeb Inc ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: farsi. farsi! farsi? farsi:
On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 01:25, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: FARSI. Yes. ;-) Disclaimer 1: This is not a Persian vs Farsi war message. Disclaimer 2: CC to FarsiWeb list is just informational. Disclaimer 3: The attached code is not in Public Domain. Disclaimer 4: This is a long boring message. Your own risk. Two long years ago, is such a day that today is, perhaps in the same wee hours in the morning but in Tehran time, I have been polishing and wrapping up some piece of code that is has been called farsi since then. The story still goes more back. Should have been in late 2000 that Roozbeh Pournader wrote some C code to convert Unicode Persian text to some legacy character set called iransystem. As a requirement for that, he wrote the joining code that was later used by me in farsi. Late 2001, my major work on FriBidi has been done, so was the time to use what I have been doing. Took Roozbeh's code, cleaned up, plugged FriBidi, and it was what you get as farsi/fjoining/. I wrote some more code to fill the gap in console to handle harakats, and called it farsi/fconsole, and finally grabbed source code from script(1), hacked a few lines, and called it farsi/fcon. With the helpf of font tools I borrowed from another project and keyboard driver I wrote down, I had finally done my pet called farsi that was doing me more than Akka was able to do (for me as a Persian). Since then the code got some clean up and some features added, but nothing else changed, even the user base itself that was limited to me, myself, and behdad. The package named farsi was still waiting for me (and Roozbeh) to resolve the copyright status and get released, while I lost my interest in bidi console and it wend down into my 10GB archive of last (lost) files. Fortunately I did three small releases of the code, first on a local list called 'farsidev' that does not exist today anymore (and I cannot remember even. Just wrote it in my ChangeLog in the package); next in a list in Hebrew community, and last in ArabEyes. Seems that the last one is the only one that has been survived history. This is the history about farsi in five paragraphs. I also hacked a Red Hat 7.2 to enable Persian on console. I later took some notes of what I did, and implemented it on another machine from my notes. The notes are in farsiredhat directory in archive attached to this mail. Note that they are pretty old. Many things have changed these days. For the past few days I have been known as the most blocker of the whole ArabEyes project ;-). So I first answer the questions I was asked about farsi, and then go through the files in attached archive. Muhammad Alkarouri wrote: Thanks Behdad for your reply. I would like to know, though, what is the expected timeframe of including joining in fribidi. 2005. No more, no less ;-). Seriously, this winter. Another question for all: - do you know any problem that affects using farsi besides bidi before joining and shaping codes, and some may be next stage points like interaction with gpm and ncurses programs? In the future, ncurses should implement its own bidi/shaping. But before that, both ncurses and gpm need to get some stable Unicode support. I am supposed to have a look at Unicode support in ncurses after I'm satisfied with GNOME (FriBidi, Pango, GTK+, AbiWord), but most probably it's not before 2005. If there aren't I will base any future work on this code rather than the akka original. :D. Nadim Shakili wrote: A couple of questions though, 1. Can we take this conversation to Arabeyes' developer mailing-list ? I'm sure we'll want to refer back to all these points in the future. Sure. 2. Can we come up with an alternate name to this package. Akka 2.0 (with no mention of the previous work or credits) ? suggestions ? Behdad, its your baby, so its your call. Well, farsi is not such a bad name as long as it's used in English written text ;-). Ok, it has proved to be a bad name. Perhaps 'farsi' is a good name, but again in written context. BTW, you should not need that word in English; one should always use Persian to refer to the language. Second, it's the Free World (as in Free Beer) of Free Software (as in Freedom) ;-). Feel Free to Fu^^Hack the code. (Free as in Freedom, not as in Beer. Don't forget my Beer). Akka 2.0, may make up a good name. I too prefer not binding a new name to the same functionality. Perhaps we would want to give some hints and credit to pre-2.0 Akka. Roozbeh? I'm fine with Akka, if on your website and the main README file, you write it this way: Akka (aka farsi) Another idea comes to my mind, about popping another name. Just take the middle and call it 'baghdad'? ;-). 3. Can we, once 12 above are agreed upon, release this code so that its archived somewhere. From what I remember
Re: farsi. farsi! farsi? farsi:
Nadim proposed something along 'beacon', as in 'bicon', as in
'bidi con{sole,dom}'. I like both. 'bicon' goes more with
'fribidi's, but as we converted freebidi to fribidi, we do bicon
to beacon too. I'm with beacon then.
No objections.
roozbeh
___
FarsiWeb mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1
On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 20:07, Sam Baran wrote: I opt for Farsi than Persian for the dominant language, used in the present Iran and the colonies abroad. It's not important what you or I opt for. That is an important point. Iran is a nation of multi-language cultures: Fars, Khuzi, Baluch, Turkman, Kurd, Armani, Asuri, Yahudi, Gilaani, Azari, Lor, and others. The Iranian nationalities have their own historically/ independently evolved languages. Some of them are remnants of the natives prior to the arrival of Aryans, 3000 years ago. Then, Farsi has its various dialects: Khoraasaani, Esfaahaani, Yazdi, Qazvini, Shiraazi, Tehraani, and others. Again, Tehraani has its own sub-dialects: Hasan-aabaadi, Chaale-meydaani, Shahre-Reyi (Raazi), Shemruni, etc. I can't see how that is related to the debate. Moreover, Farsi is the name used by the Iranian government. No, Persian is the name used by the Iranian government. All literature in Iran and Iranian colonies abroad, are labeled under Farsi. No they are not. Let me take a random book from my bookshelf... Ok, this is vaazhe-naame-ye riaazi o aamaar, ingilisi-faarsi, faarsi-ingilisi published by anjoman-e riaazi-e iraan and gorooh-e riaazi o aamaar-e markaz-e nashr-e daaneshgaahi, published in 1370 (Solar Islamic year), ISBN 964-01-0599-6. The English title uses Persian instead of Farsi: Dictionary of Mathematics and Statistics, English-Persian, Persian-English. Well, I just checked my whole library at the office. There is no single book that is labeled Farsi around, all use Persian when they refer to the name of the language on the title. Therefore, Farsi is more descriptive of the the main language used in the Iranian plateau. I don't see that claim proved. Incidentally, Afghanistan is a multi-language country with secondary dialects. A person from Herat has hard time conversing with one from Kandahar or Kabul: Urdu, Dari, Pushtu, etc. Well, I was from Tehran, and I didn't have a hard time communicating in Kabul. Some people even considered me a Herati from my accent. Also, You should note that Pashto and Urdu are completely different langauges from Persian (which Dari is a dialect of). They have different grammar, different orthography, and different vocabulary. Bejan Baran Just curious: Is your name Sam or Bejan? Your signature is contradicting your From: line. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1
On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 02:34, C Bobroff wrote: And why didn't anyone answer Saber's PersianComputing questions last week? They were quite reasonable and on topic and even related to Persian computing! Perhaps no one knew the answer. Really. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: What the hell is this Yeh and Keheh problem?
On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 02:03, C Bobroff wrote: I believe in principle, the search engines are to consider Persian and Arabic Yeh to be the same. They should consider it to be weakly equivalent. That's the term. Same as they do for, say, capital A and small a, or a-umlaut (ä) and normal a. Yet they do not. Why? Are the tables they are consulting faulty? Are they consulting the wrong tables? Does no one even know this is a problem? Who handles this so they can fix the problem? Google does, for example. MSN also does, if they have a Persian search. As for contacting them, feel free to do so. I had done the same once with all the authority I could use from the Unicode Consortium, to no avail (in other words, I got no reply or action). And what if we WANT the search engine to distinguish between the Persian and Arabic? You provide an option to the engine, mentioning that it shouldn't use its equivalent tables. But can you do that with A and a in Google? something like the first line in the Divan of Hafez: alaa yaa ayyuhaa saaqi ader ka'san wa naawelhaa Is that lang=fa or lang=ar? I agree that it's a hard question. Really depends on how you are going to write the saaqi part. Since it's pronounced /i:/, it should be written as dotted Yeh in the Arabic language. If you're writing it with a dotless Yeh, it should be Persian transliteration of Arabic text. Now, how do you mark an English tranliteration of Arabic text? With en or ar? Of course you'll use en. So in that case, you should use fa. I wonder why you say #1740; instead of U+06CC?? :) :) He's a real person, not a computer programmer! Real people prefer decimal to hexadecimal, I guess. But AmirBehzad, it's an inconvenience to refer to Unicode characters by their decimal code. If you want to use HTML escapes, please use the in #x06cc; format, instead of #1740;. Both are unreadable to a casual reader, but the first is readable by an specialist without using a scientific calculator. I am slowly starting to think your idea is indeed the solution to the Yeh and Kaf problem. I hope the more technically astute people will also wake up and give you some feedback. The solution? The solution is of course fixing every software immediately. But I agree that AmirBehzad's is acutally a nice idea. To detect what the browser support properly (possibly using some JavaScript, browser sniffing, and other tricks) and then serve the browser what it can display. It works fine for display purposes, but there are scenarios that it not sufficent. Let's say a user is using IE5 on Win98, and he has the Persian Yeh bug. AmirBehzad's script serves her Arabic Yeh in medial and initial forms. She sees everything fine. But then, she wants to search the (already-retreived) web page using the Find menu on her browser (which has not implemented any such Yeh equivalence). The result: she can't find the Arabic Yeh (or the Persian one). Another alternative story: Let's say the writer of the page likes to say: Don't use Arabic Yehs like 'ي', use Persian Yehs like 'ی'.? You'll agree that he will be scared when the software does him weird things. The best solution, is updating the software and the fonts. And nagging to the developers of the software if that doesn't fix the problem. And writing your own software if that did't work either. Or learning to write software if you don't know how. Or forgetting it all if it's not worth the effort. (RoozBEH, are you almost done cleaning out your Inbox??) I'm doing it now. Next shot in 90 days. Perhaps the script could also check if the win9x user has IE6 in addition and if so, let them see Persian. I agree. I would like to request that you make a simple webpage and post it somewhere for newbies to copy and paste. It would be nice if you put a little alternating Persian and English content so people see how to switch between the two. An exterior .CSS file that is 100% compliant with directions for copying for one's own use would be so nice. For test purposes, the Persian content should include some tricky things like parentheses, diacritics (tashdid, sokun, zir, zabar, pish, etc), zero-width-joiner, zero-width-non-joiner, heh+hamza, and something requiring mouseovers (or some such feature requiring the browser to calculate where the word is on the page.) After making everything as standard and compliant as possible, also put in your script, and most important, directions for how to copy and explanation for why it is there, I think this would be the best. Very good recommendations. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Persian Country List
On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 21:10, Sina Ahmadian wrote: After searching almost all the net for a persian list of countries, I didn't find anything! Some websites use the english country list while others leave the users free to enter their country name. I remember I've seen a persian country list somewhere online, but don't know exactly where! Please reply if you have such a list or know where I can find it. Hmm, lemme see... This is what the countries are called in Iran: http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en/utf-8/?_=fa_IRSHOWCountries=1#Countries And this is for Afghanistan: http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/en/utf-8/?_=fa_AFSHOWCountries=1#Countries (For some reason, the list of Afghan names are not complete. Use the Iranian ones if one is lacking.) Please tell me if you found any errors, as this is becoming widely deployed, specially in IBM and Apple software. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: SOLVED: Button translation
On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 11:04, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Button Phrasing. Write button labels as imperative verbs, for example Save, Print. This allows users to select an action with less hesitation. An active phrase also fits best with the button's role in initiating actions, as contrasted with a more passive phrase. For example Find and Log In are better buttons than than Yes and OK. Isn't this only about *English* button labels? roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Translation
On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 00:28, Peyman wrote: Persian has one of the most productive word formation systems. I would appreciate seeing some statistics to back that up, like you have done with the verbs. Do you have any? roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Translation
On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 12:29, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: Well, you're probably right, but then the suffixes are going to lose all their meaning as a suffix. After a while there would be no common sense between words ending with ak... (and yes, there would be no suffix, some new words). Guest what? The suffixes have already lost their meanings. This same -ak is a good example. You want language control and mathematical semantics, which is more than impossible with a language like Persian, IMHO. -gaan is not anything special, it's just aan for plural, joined to a word ending with hah-e naamalfooz. Just like saadegaan. So it means datas. But again AFAIK data and daade are both plurals. Don't know about paadegaan. I am sorry, I am not talking about *that* -gaan. I'm *only* talking about the -gaan in paadegaan. That's an abbreviation: FTP = gharaardaad-e enteghaal-e parvande: gheyn, alef, pe. If you have problems with abbreviations, don't use them. And write gharaardaad-e enteghaal-e parvande everywhere? Write FTP if you like, or whatever you prefer. Go with fetepe if you like that. Or call it chiz ;-) You're definitely not bound by any of the requirements of the Academy. This is the translation of the Redo menu, not the action of redo-ing. I agree that it's not that good, but I've not seen many good ones. Your suggestion? az no reminds me of reset in forms. dobaare and tekraar may have the same meaning as az no, but do it better, again IMHO. At last something I can pass. I'll ask the guys. * scroll - navardidan! The problem? Your suggestion? navardidan is completely another word, isn't? It do not hold the feeling of rolling in a single direction, and it contains a sense of a challenge, that cannot be ignored. My suggestion? Good question. OK, from my Moaser Persian Dictionary: [adabi] dar mohit, mantaghe, yaa masiri harekat kardan va az noghte-i be noghte-ye digar-e aan raftan. I can't see the sense of challenge there. I agree that it's not scrolling exactly, but what translation has the exact senses of its original word? Time will give all the senses to it. * output (device) - khorooji (Isn't khorooji also a noun in Persian?) It's *only* a noun in Persian, as far as I can tell. I'm not getting what you mean. Would you explain? From what I get, is that they are translating the output of a program as boroon-daad, but an output device as dastgaah-e khorooji. Exactly. What is the problem then? The problem is that, they are misusing their power to decide for the language! They have been asked to do so. We need an authority for the language. American English has Merriam-Webster, British English has Oxford, German has Duden, and French has its Academie. They are trying their best to provide authority. As far as I can tell, they are coming to a point of good output. Well, I could never ever think about defending the Academy, but I'm doing that. Why? First, because they're having some good-enough output (which, well, you don't agree to, which I can understand). But second, because I've seen the anarchy out here, everyone considering himself/herself the authority, without even consulting the references. Haven't you? Aren't we on the same front exactly because of that? You and I could have been decide on many technicall matters, and spread it all around the world by coding that here and there. But we have never done that so to decide for others. We have never done that, since we know our work is not authoritative enough. Because it has not been the result of a consensus of experts. Academy's output is partially the result of such a consensus. Better the propose words and wait some 5 or 10 years, and decide if that can be settled. rayane is setteled down. But the way they do it, they force many bodies to follow their word. Well, these are not exactly *new* words. The words have been around and used for a long time by some translators. ISI's word list (masterminded by Dr Mashayekh) is the main source for these, as is Mohammadifar's Computer Dictionary (published by Moaser), and the entrepreneurial works of Dr Rohani-Rankoohi and Dr Badi', all of whom are members of the computer terms committee (with a few other people). I can't say they haven't seen all the references: they have. I've talked all of them (but Dr Rohani-Rankoohi) on different matters, and I know they don't move an inch in these waters without contacting every reference they can find on the matter. It's easy to start calling them fossils, as we young people love to do, and close their dossier so easily, but we need to separate real work from just inventing random words (like some people we know have been doing). I really believe you should provide feedback to the Academy, and see what reasons they have. I'm meeting Dr Mashayekh (the head of the computer terms committee) to talk on exactly the same subject this Wednesday morning. I promise I forward
Re: FarsiWeb Digest, Vol 4, Issue 9
On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 16:38, Behnam wrote: But in the meantime, do you know where is the small Alef for putting on the Final Yeh (in hattaa for example) or Farsi Hamza (Yeh-e-raabet) that we put on the final Heh in this standard layout? I couldn't find them anywhere. They are not in ISIRI 2901:1994. But a new version of the national keyboard standard (due in 1382) will include them, and many other required characters. See the archives of this list for more information, including the exact layout. I'm out of luck here. I have Microsoft Office for Macintosh but it doesn't support right to left languages, nor Unicode. These things are reserved for their own platform! MS Office for Mac is very bad with regard to right to left languages. OpenOffice 1.1 may be a solution, but it's not integrated with Mac OS interface good enough. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: ARABIC FARSI YEH
On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 18:11, Behnam wrote: From what I see, there is no Farsi keyboard layout (on PC or Mac) that uses the real Farsi Yeh (U+06CC) they use either U+0649 the Arabic Alef Maksurah (for Mac and some PCs) or U+064A the Arabic Yeh (for some other PCs, with chopped off dots in the Arabic glyph in the font!) Windows 2000 and Windows XP both use U+06CC in their 'Farsi' keyboard layouts. I don't know about current versions of Mac OS (which has a keyboard named 'Persian'), but Panther (Mac OS 10.3) will include a Persian keyboard layout based on ISIRI 2901:1994. To my knowledge, most Farsi fonts don't have real Farsi Yeh. Some do, but it's actually not being used by current Farsi keyboards on either platforms. You're somehow right. But this is something that is being fixed everywhere, although not quickly. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
For the World's A B C's, He Makes 1's and 0's
An Article by New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/technology/circuits/25code.html roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Major Enhancements to the Unicode Standard: Enabling InternationalDomain Names, Expanding Worldwide Accessibility, and Reducing the DigitalDivide
FYI. -Forwarded Message- From: Magda Danish (Unicode) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Major Enhancements to the Unicode Standard: Enabling International Domain Names, Expanding Worldwide Accessibility, and Reducing the Digital Divide Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 06:11:25 -0700 Major Enhancements to the Unicode Standard: Enabling International Domain Names, Expanding Worldwide Accessibility, and Reducing the Digital Divide Mountain View, CA, August 27, 2003 -- The Unicode Consortium and Addison-Wesley announce publication of Version 4.0 of the Unicode Standard. Unicode is the fundamental specification for the representation of text, at the core of all modern software, programming languages, and standards, including Windows, Java, C#, Perl, XML, HTML, DB2, Oracle, and many others. Unicode is also central to the new internationalized domain names, which allow everyone in the world to have URLs in their own languages. This is yet another case where Unicode opens the door to more of the world's different cultures, helping to break down the digital divide. Version 4.0 strengthens Unicode support for worldwide communication, software availability, and publishing. The text has been extensively rewritten, and incorporates specifications that were previously only available as separate documents. The clarified specification of conformance requirements incorporates the most highly developed character encoding model in existence, encompassing the wide variety of types of characters needed by the world's languages, and permitting compatibility with all modern computer architectures. Record-breaking character content Version 4.0 encodes over 96,000 characters, twice as many as Version 3.0, and includes two record-breaking collections of encoded characters. The largest encoded character collection for Chinese characters in the history of computing has doubled in size yet again to encompass over 2000 years of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese literary usage, including all the main classical dictionaries of these languages. Version 4.0 also encodes the largest set of characters for mathematical and technical publishing in existence. The character repertoires of Version 4.0 and International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 are fully synchronized. Reducing the digital divide To meet the needs of all linguistic communities, the Unicode Standard and associated standards are continually being extended, not only in terms of the addition of characters, but also in specifying *how* those characters work, such as: - how text sorts or matches in different languages - how text behaves for East Asian languages (e.g. vertically) or in Middle Eastern languages (from right to left) - how text should upper- or lowercase - how text breaks into lines or words - how text behaves in Regular Expressions (a key tool used in a vast number of web servers) Small linguistic communities all over the world have the opportunity to get mainstream software working right out of the box, instead of waiting years for special adaptations that may never come. For more information on the scripts encoded in the Unicode Standard, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ Version 4.0 is published by Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-321-18578-1), and is available from the Unicode Consortium or through the book trade. The text and code charts of Version 4.0 are also available on the Consortium's Web site www.unicode.org. About the Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. Members of the Consortium are a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information technology industry. Full members are: Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Basis Technology, Government of India (Ministry of Information Technology), Government of Pakistan (National Language Authority), HP, IBM, Justsystem, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, RLG, SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Sybase. Membership in the Unicode Consortium is open to organizations and individuals anywhere in the world who support the Unicode Standard and wish to assist in its extension and implementation. For additional information on Unicode, contact the Unicode Consortium, 650-693-3921 About Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley (www.awprofessional.com) is the leading publisher of quality computer science and engineering books and software for technical professionals, developed and authored by the world's leading technology experts. It is a unit of Pearson Technology Group, the world's largest provider of consumer and professional computer, information technology, engineering and reference content. Pearson Technology Group is an operating
Re: Unicode in new IRNA site
On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 09:50, C Bobroff wrote: Just don't tell me the calligraphers have also joined the band-wagon and are now putting the dots! Fortunately they're not. You know, everybody who's caring and sane enough to proofread, makes sure these don't appear on paper (or sometimes on the computer screen), but again, not all of these people care what it is that's stored in their computers. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Unicode in new IRNA site
On Sun, 2003-08-24 at 22:16, C Bobroff wrote:
But then once you do notice,
then you REALLY notice. Those two little dots get under your skin and it
starts to fester. You start to ONLY see the dots and the rest of the
content becomes a blur. Insanity is imminent. The only solution: Immediate
surgical removal of the dots using the latest Search/Replace technology.
They do get under the skin, yes, but it's a little worse than that if
you start seeing the two little dots everyday on announcements,
printouts, ads, ... It will get to your {maghz-e ostekhaan}.
roozbeh
___
FarsiWeb mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Unicode in new IRNA site
On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 21:49, C Bobroff wrote: By the way, this is yet another reason I offer up thanks to Roozbeh, Behnam (and others) for the new Persian keyboard as the Arabic Yeh is only a convenient Shift key away and makes for much more fruitful Google searches! Well, thank the original designers of ISIRI 2901:1994. They did it eight years ago without even knowing the problem it's solving for you today. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: Unicode in new IRNA site
On Sat, 2003-08-23 at 03:31, C Bobroff wrote: OK, I took up your challenge and just emailed Yahoo. Don't blame me when we discover they've replaced Arabic Yeh with CYRILLIC LETTER YA U+042F! I don't like it. I wasn't challenging you. 'Was challenging the silent lurkers. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[Fwd: Unicode 4.0 is online!]
FYI. -Forwarded Message- From: Kenneth Whistler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Unicode 4.0 is online! Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 17:32:15 -0700 Unicadetti, The day you have been waiting for has arrived. All of the pdf for the online version of Unicode 4.0 has been generated and is now available. Tune your browsers to: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ All of the preliminary chapter postings have been replaced with the final book content as it is currently being printed by Addison-Wesley. In particular, you might want to admire the greatly improved General Index to the book, brought to you courtesy of Joe Becker and Joan Aliprand. Not only is the index vastly expanded and completely rethought, the pdf version has completely active links to take you back to the text that is indexed. O.k., now there are no excuses that the standard is not available. ;-) --Ken (for the rest of the editorial gang -- particularly Eric Muller and Julie Allen, who did the actual work for this online posting) P.S. We are looking into the pdf generation glitch which has the pages coming up at too small a size, so that you have to resize them before reading. When we sort this out, we'll repost with pages which default to an appropriate size on loading. ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [PersianComputing] Koodak font: alpha release
On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 18:45, C Bobroff wrote: There is already a font called Koodak. Won't users (and their computers) have a problem when they THINK they are seeing this font but it's really the old one? It won't occur to them to download the new one. The point is, this is exactly just *that* Koodak, but only improved with regard to Unicode compatiblity. FarsiWeb is only fixing already existing fonts, not providing new designs. As for user (and computer ;)) education, that's not our expertise. We'll consider any specific advice. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Fwd: Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages
FYI. -Forwarded Message- From: Susan Lesch [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: W3C Weekly News - 19 June 2003 Date: 19 Jun 2003 12:05:30 -0700 Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages Republished Updated for The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages has been republished as a Unicode Technical Report and a W3C Note. These guidelines cover the use of Unicode with markup languages such as XML. They are published jointly by the Unicode Technical Committee and the W3C Internationalization Working Group and Interest Group. Read about the W3C Internationalization Activity. http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-unicode-xml-20030613/ http://www.unicode.org/ http://www.w3.org/International/ ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Linguasoft wrote: The question remains why you provide direct keyboard input for combining hamza madda. Are there any letter combinations other than with alef/ya/waw that can be created via combination? Yes. Heh. (I've seen accents added in handwriting for Pashto and even Dari!) Well, I've seen a whole Dari book typeset with a Pashto typewriter and then an additional slash added to each and every Gaf by hand. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [PersianComputing] RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: For whatever they're worth, they're here as PDF files: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html That only mentions there is only one Kurdish letter not already in Persian. But we know a lot of accent marks are used, while the above reference only mentions one of the cases in an extra note. I won't consult it. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: What is the character on alt+control+d? It's the Arabic Alef Maksura. For cases you just need a dandaane in the middle of a word. Almost always Koranic quotes. Or maybe that's supposed to be the tatweel?? No, Tatweel is at Shift+-. And forgive my ignorance but when do you use subscript alif? I've only used it in Pakistani contexts. We use it under Yeh sometimes, to mention that this Yeh has an /i:/ sound, and not an /ej/ sound. The usage is usually educational or Koranic. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb] Re: Persian input with US/European keyboard
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Nigel Greenwood wrote: If you mean that it's easier to type Persian on a Persian _physical_ keyboard with the Iranian layout, I'm sure you're right. PerScript is designed for use on US/European QWERTY keyboards, where the keys are actually marked Q, W, E, R, T, Y, etc. Well, on thise keyboard I'm typing now, the keys are actually markes Q, W, E, R, T, Y, etc. The same is true with many other keyboard in our office, or the whole Sharif University. In other words: No Persian labels. So, in yet other words: I'm typing on a US keyboard, and I prefer my Beh to be on F instead of on B. So do many others. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: If you don't redefine your concept of easy, Well, honestly the way it is now in MS software (or even Linux) is not good enough even for experts. IMO, all OS-es should come automatically with all languages enabled, or, at the minimum, come with an automatic update the first time the user opens a document in, say, Chinese or switches to a, say, Pashto keyboard layout. people are going to say it's too hard to bother with this script and that's why they advocate romanizing Persian. I don't care if they can do that properly. If they suggest a sane mechanism for latinizing Persian. The point is: nobody has ever come up with a real suggestion, one that considers all the invovled details. They usually just publish a table and stop there. I may even jump on the train if they come up with a reference dictionary and a software to convert the older documents. Do you know just to enable FA input on a Windows machine is asking too much for newbies? It is. That is the reason the newbies should have these automatically installed for them when they buy the machine. Or they should employ someone to do that for them!!! The golden rule is: If you are a newbie, know it, don't nag to others that you have a right to be ignorant, and ask or pay for expert advice. That's what is already happening in the law world, or the automechanic world, or ... I was even joking with someone at MS that a first-time user should be able to sit down at the comptuer and say, Please activate Persian and automatically FA will be enabled, Word will fire up, nastaliq font ^ No, no Nastaliq font. It's not the default for Persian anymore. People have a hard time reading Nastaliq for anything longer than a few words. at reasonable fontsize selected and RTL/right-aligned mode on and on-screen keyboad at your service! Even this probably won't be sufficient... It won't be. The system should start the Persian support at the first moment the user starts talking Persian to the microphone. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Linguasoft wrote: These are *combining* Maddah, Hamza Above, and Hamza Below. Isn't that what I called deadkeys in another context? (Had no time to look into SC Unipad so far to see how exactly they function...) There is a difference. Dead keys are typed before the base letter. These are typed after the base letter. smart quotes: I see your point, but please see my point too. There are people editing bilingual technical manuals (like me) where certain types of quotes are mandatory, even for languages like Persian that normally prefer another type of quotes (guillemets). I understand. You have special requirements. But unfortunately, I have no clue how to get this fixed. I may help you with information from ALA-LC (American Library Association/Library of Congress) containing exact lists of characters, alongside with standard transliterations, for all languages you are interested in. Well, there are some problems here. We want, say, modern Baluchi script as written in Iran. LoC will probably provide us with every Arabic letters that has ever been used in any Baluchi. And they may even give us that by mistake. Let me give you an example. There is a certain character in Unicode, a Hah with two vertical dots over it, and it was mentioned as being a Pashto letter. We found that it's not used in modern Pashto at all. Unicode experts said that it comes from the librarians, so it should be used in older orthographies. Next time we were in Kabul we contacted all the experts, and found many older letters that were not in Unicode, but not a single evidence of this certain letter. No expert had ever seen it. Guess what? It was possibly a mistake by some librarian somewhere, or a letter just a single author had used. We don't want these in our set. I have no information about frequency, except that for Kurdish, I might be able to generate a frequency list from some electronic texts that I compile din the past. (There may be more recent webpages as well but I will have to look around.) I won't trust web pages, since they had been done using the limited technology. But we'd appreciate your Kurdish list. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Linguasoft wrote: But doesn't ALEF MAKSURA appear mostly at the end of words, i.e. in its final or isolated forms? It does, but that is the Arabic. A normal Persian Yeh is used in Persian contexts. For example, both words ali and kobraa should be written (and encoded in Unicode) using a Persian Yeh. What's more, in Arabic, when you add a personal suffix (etc.) to ALEF MAKSURA, it will assume medial/initial forms *with dots*... This is probably a bug in your software, or just it being old. Alef Maksura was only a right-joining character until Unicode 3.0 (like Reh, Dal, ...), and it got changed to a dual-joining character in Unicode 3.0.1. I wonder where you have drawn the border line between Unicode characters that are used only in Koranic texts, and other symbols such as cantillation marks or calligraphic elements such as U+FDF4, U+FDFA, U+FDFB, etc. (these Unicode values are given for reference only, not because I advocate making Arabic presentation forms available via direct keyboard input). We don't draw any line. We have just put some of them on the main keys and the others on AltGr based on frequence and other concerns, based on what a Persian typist usually sees in her day's pile of work. Traditionally, there have been special calligraphic fonts for all these add-on characters but they weren't easy to handle. I wonder whether it would not make sense to design a special (extended) keyboard for them, which may go hand-in-hand with the creation of suitable OT fonts. Are there any efforts made in this direction? Not any that I know of. (Although I don't even know if this is a good thing to do.) Lastly, a question related to the SHIFT+8 key: It's presently ASTERISK (U+002A, but wouldn't it be more appropriate for Farsi context to use this position for the ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR (U+066D) symbol, and move the ASTERISK somewhere else, e.g. to ALT+8? Strangely, the ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR symbol has *six* points in Arial Unicode MS and *eight* points in Tahoma. How comes? :-) Ok, let's start with a little bit of history: the whole reason there is a five-pointed Arabic star, is that some hardline Muslims belived that *any* six-pointed star resembles the Jewish *Star of David*, and so insisted on using a five-pointed one. This was not only them. Actually the same had happened with Jews and a much more frequent symbol, the *plus sign* itself. Some hardline Jews considered that a cross, and thus a symbol of Christianity. So, even these days, some of the Israeli school books are published with another addition symbol, one that looks like a normal plus sign with the bottom like ommitted, something like a is perpendicular to symobl: | --+-- In Iran, typographers almost always use the six-pointed star to, say, separate unrelated paragraphs (where usually three is used). Thus, fortunately because of the lack of such hardliners (or them being unaware of this concept), we have the more standard six-pointed one in the typeset books and on the layout. An exhausted roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: An exhausted but euphoric Roozbeh? Not euphoric. Not at all. I just feel talkative. The really good word for what I am now is tired. I need a lot of alcohol, and then a lot of sleep. A good Persian word is mozmahel. Admit it, you're enjoying every minute! The visa won't get ready until Monday morning either. So I'm getting more frustrated, and I stick more to work. The whole reason I came to office today was to read possible emails on what happened with the visa. And now I'm watching another movie, am postponing a long list of things I have to do in order to get the money poured into the project, I'm not answering phones, or even my cellphone, ... I just feel I need to answer the questions, or you, Behnam, and Peter will go into a deep loop of discussing something based on a wrong assumption. I just feel the ultimate necessity to answer. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: No, I've alerted all the embassies of the world not to issue you any more visas for conferences. It should have been you then :)) Look how much we all have profited from the fruits of your visa frustations of the past few days-- a very nice keyboard, installation instructions + documentatin The layout is the outcome of a meeting. I was just a member. If you mean the software, it took about half an hour or a little more because of the nice MS tool for its creation. Oh, while we're at it, would you tell your MS friends to all a ZWNJ on Shift+Space with their tool? I went through many tricks to get it done, but the keyboard compiler catches me at the final second always. and so many questions answered! Your sacrifice is GREATLY appreciated! That is something now :) roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] Re: [PersianComputing] Persian Keyboard Layout Preview
On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: Yes, that's what I meant and it took YOU half an hour but would have taken me and the silent lurkers weeks or possibly never so thank you. I don't believe it. Full stop. And did I hear you say, nice MS tool? Hmmm It's a nice tool. But it's a shame that it's not shipped with MS Windows, and it's a shame that it came s late. But the NICE TOOL doesn't recognize ZWJ or ZWNJ to be spaces. (The space bar is only for spacing characters.) Maybe your friends at Unicode haven't properly labelled it so the NICE TOOL can tell what it is?? The question is: Why is the space bar only for spacing characters? Who requires that? And why? (I can name a few pieces of software for Windows that can help you assign a ZWNJ to Shift+space and don't nag. So this is not a Windows *requirement*.) My friends at Unicode are labeling it as a control character, which it really is. Your friends at Microsoft should also allow control character for space, or tell us why they can't. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb] IE crash code! (fwd)
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Behnam Esfahbod wrote: take a look at this mail. you can find the example at: - http://esfahbod.info/proj/web/test/ie/crash.html i'd tested the page with IE6 SP1 (latest microsoft update), and it crashed too! I'm sorry, this is completely off-topic. Please stop sending completely unrelated messages to the list. Find other places for messages on general Windows security or whatever. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Linguasoft wrote: Thanks for your efforts to provide us with an experimental version of the new standard keyboard layout for Persian ! You're welcome Peter. But please don't propagate it much, since that may be changed. I tried the keyboard in Word2000/Win2000, using Arial Unicode MS which displays all glyphs that can be generated via the keyboard except Riyal sign and Subscript alef. Rial sign is Unicode 3.2. Subscript Alef is Unicode 4.0. Microsoft has not enough time to implement them for you. I am not quite sure in which context standalone versions of maddah, hamzah above and hamzah below are used, but assume they are there because they are in the Unicode standard. They are not the standalone ones. These are *combining* Maddah, Hamza Above, and Hamza Below. But since these were only encoded in Unicode 3.0, and Windows/Office 2000 only handles pre-2.1 characters properly, they appear as standalones ones to you. Try the keyboard with SC Unipad, for example, and you'll see. Standard shortcuts of Word for C, R, and T also work with the Persian keyboard. Interesting news. I didn't know about them at all. What does not work is Word's AutoCorrect option for smart quotes, i.e. neither quotation mark (U+0022) nor apostrophe (U+0027) are converted into their smart equivalents; I wonder if this feature is keyboard-(dll)-related but if it is, I suggest to implement it as well as many users, especially in bilingual context, may want to use typographically correct English quotation marks. We have no clue how to fix that even if that is a desired effect. For me, that would be undesired. The quotation mark and the apostrophe (and a few others) were only added to help manual entry of rich text (like TeX, XML, and HTML) in a text editor without having the need to switch the layout very often. How would you input ZSNJ, and RTL/LTR markers with the new keyboard? (These special characters aren't mentioned in keyboard.png as well.) What is ZSNJ? If you mean ZWNJ, it is Shift+B. I also don't know what you mean by RTL and LTR markers. If you mean the Bidirectional control characters, they are at AltGr+9,0,I,O,P,[,]. I also wonder whether there is any accepted standard to show alef maqsura on keytops. In keyboard.png, you use an initial shape of ya without dots which may be misleading; how about using isolated ya without dots but with a superscript alef (I remember this was a keytop inscription on a keyboard for an Arabic/Persian typesetting machine that I use many years ago...) In a Persian context, you should only use Alef Maksura (a.k.a the dotless Arabic Yeh) only in initial and medial form. This is required when one needs to type a few Koranic quotes. An isolated Yeh without dots with a superscript Alef over it should be typed using the Persian Yeh and then a superscript Alef (D, Shift-V). Are there any decisions as to support other regional languages such as Kurdish or Azeri? The general attitude in the commitee is to support those languages if enough information is provided. We need to know about the exact list of characters each need, and their estimated frequency/importance. If the ultimate goal is to support several languages using an extended Arabic glyphset via one and the same keyboard, my feeling is that some Shift or Alt key positions may have better been reserved for special characters of these languages, or defined as deadkeys to create certain accented characters (as in case of the US International keyboard). We are not trying an extended Arabic set. But we'd love a layout that is able to support all major minority languages of Iran, although optimized for Persian. We may even try to create layouts optimized for them if we can find the expertise. But we are not interested in Pashto, Sindhi, or Urdu at all, while we are very interested in Azeri, Kurdish, Baluchi, ... roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: In a textbook, you might want to say, This here is a maddah. In the past, I wanted to show what a superscript alif compared to fatha looks like and was not able to You should put them either over a space, or a Tatweel (U+0640, the base line extender that looks like a '_'). roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Linguasoft wrote: No other keyboard I know for extended Arabic languages provides keytop positions for standalone versions of maddah, hamzah above and hamzah below, although it might make sense to use these keys as deadkeys to type compounded glyphs alef-madda, alef-hamza, waw-hamza, etc., in order to have keytop positions that are presently occupied by these compounds free for other characters or symbols. That is a limitation of the software you are using. These are combining ones. For comparison, European keyboards or the US-International keyboard also do not include standalone versions of all accents, and use many keys (accent keys and others) with a deadkey function to generate accented characters. Just for the record, I oppose any deadkey mechanism for any Arabic script keyboard layout. The notion is rather complicated, and is only familiar to the Europeans. Asian people are used to live keys instead, the ones that appear after the letter. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
RE: [farsiweb] New keyboard layout for Windows
On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, C Bobroff wrote: Just over a space is fine but the font should be able to render it and the fontmakers don't always know what all people may want to type. That's some other matter. If the fontmakers see it's a character on the keyboard, they might make an isolated form. There is no need for an isolated form. The rendering engine (the program that puts the glyphs in the font on the screen next to each other) is supposed to render that. Then if the user can type anything and everything desired, great stuff can be written in Persian and we can stop this jpeg/gif/latin transliteration business! We are also trying to get there. Only the details in the path we choose are a little different. Best to make it as easy as possible to type everything! Depends on how you define easy. Try! roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb] Testing, please ignore
This is a test to check that the list are now up and running. Please ignore. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]Announcement: New Unicode Savvy Logo (fwd)
FYI. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:49:24 -0700 From: Magda Danish (Unicode) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Announcement: New Unicode Savvy Logo Dear Unicoders, Very often the Unicode Consortium has received requests from webmasters who wished to indicate with a logo or banner that their site supports or uses Unicode. For such purposes we have developed two logos that can be freely displayed on web sites. You can use a Unicode Savvy logo to indicate that a page (or collection of pages) is encoded in Unicode. To learn more and to obtain an image of these logos, please refer to http://www.unicode.org/consortium/unisavvy.html. Thank you and best regards, Magda Danish Administrative Director The Unicode Consortium 650-693-3921 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]Kurdish Language
On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Shervin Afshar wrote: I believe that Kurdi language has not a written form and it uses farsi script. No, you're wrong. It indeed has a written form and has some special letters only used in Kurdish. I can't point to a specific resource (I am indeed searching for experts), but I have seen Kurdish books. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]Unicode Advertisement
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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]Unicode character names (was Re: Unicode Advertisement)
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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]Using persian in the website
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, M wrote: The problem is that I am a anti-microsoft prophet :-) Oh, you want Linux software? Red Hat 8.0's GNOME editor (gedit) and KDE editors (Kate and Kedit?) support Persian editing (with a few bugs), and so does yudit (http://www.yudit.org/). Latest vim also supports Unicode, but with Left-to-right Persian/Arabic. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision [OFFTOPIC]
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Masoud Sharbiani wrote: You can't revoke a license by not just providing the software anymore. Yes you can. That was exactly what happened to OEone, where FSF prohibited us from providing bash, glibc (and therefore all of our distro, since we used glibc) because of a breach we did from GPL (it is now resolved). FSF people didn't revoke a license themselves. The license automatically got revoked because of the breach. This is mentioned in clause 4 of GPL: 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. So, in practice what happens is that MSFT's lawyers would contact the owner of that SF project, and tell them to 'cease and desist' since still they own the distributed material, and they can change terms of service, much like a leased car, or apartment. Just like that. I can't agree. Not if the SF guys follow the license (OEone had not followed the license). But I agree that the SF guys may stop distributing the fonts if MSFT starts to threaten them a little. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]YEH problem decision
On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, C Bobroff wrote: Speaking of Windows, I have heard unsubstantiated reports that even with WinXP, the yeh (06CC--on the d key) works great in some editing programs such as Word but even on the same computer, fails to work in other programs. That will be correct if you replace with when using other fonts. The Yeh problem is font-specific, and if I recall correctly, some of the Windows XP's Arabic fonts still have that bug. Also, it's true that the fonts have been corrected concerning the yeh. However, the people in the Microsoft Typography dept who have removed the free font downloads don't seem to know that there is no way to legally obtain the corrected fonts (unless they upgrade.) They may not know, but there *is* a way to legally obtain the corrected fonts. For an example, please see: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ Just curious: What if you are searching for an Arabic word but you are inputting your search in FA mode (maybe you are more familiar with the keyboard layout, etc.) Since some of the yeh forms in Arabic and Persian are identical (in appearance) but have different unicode values, will this not adversely affect your search? This will affect your search and find all the other Yehs also. In the case this is not desired, you should be able to turn off this magic as an option, like the uppercase/lowercase searching option in many search boxes. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]Re: kbdfa.dll in XP
Dear Mr Rezaei, We don't support Windows XP. You can test it for yourself to see if it works for you (some people could make it work with XP and some others couldn't). About the p == ~ thing, FarsiWeb's KBDFA.DLL is based on Iranian national standard ISIRI 2901. You can read ISIRI 2901 at: http://www.isiri.org/std/2901.htm -- The FarsiWeb Project Group http://www.farsiweb.info/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sun, 16 Feb 2003, mehdi rezaei wrote: i download KBDFA.DLL from farsiweb. can i type farsi(with farsi keyboard p == ~) in xp windows (aya dar windows xp ham mitavan az in dll estefade kard) ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]Test
This is just for testing purposes. Please ignore this. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb]ISIRI 6219:2002
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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]Re: unicode fields in database
On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, C Bobroff wrote: Instead of someone new asking every 3 months how can I sort Persian?, The whole problem is that people post questions without looking at the archives, or searching the Google. They look at the internet as an Oracle, instead of a knowledge base. why doesn't one of you who is technically astute please compile all these sorting patches and put them in one place with a description of bugs and features of each and some step-by-step instructions on how to implement them? Sure that will be good. I will be able to put any such HOWTO on the FarsiWeb web site, if that goes with the style of our other HOWTOs there, and doesn't recommend anything insane (read very non-standard). The younger generation is going to get accustomed to looking at the end of the alphabet for certain letters and not be sure whether heh or vav comes first so better hurry! You're over-exaggerating. That won't happen in Iran. The young generation are clearly taught about the main order. It's the secondary order (Hamzas, Teh Marbuta, ...) that is still under debate. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]unicode fields in database
On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, FK wrote: All these problems with the Arabic script makes me a believer in changing our alphabet to a Latin-based one and getting rid of all these unnecessary headaches :-) The whole point is: all other languages have similiar problems, including those written in Latin. The main difference, is usually that there is not enough market for Persian abilities in software. Just some examples: Swedish sorts 'v' and 'w' as one letter. Turkish and Azeri have different capitalization rules than the other languages, since they have two different 'i's. Slovak treats 'ch' as a single letter sorted between 'c' and 'd'. Hungarian sorts 'czz' as it were 'czcz'. French needs a ligated 'oe' letter, which does not even exist in ISO-8859-1, ... IMHO, the Latin script will not solve the problems, it just adds another complexity dimension. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]unicode fields in database
On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Nasiri2 wrote: Do you use Persian unicode fields in any database? How do you sort these fields while the letters Gaf,Cheh,Peh, and Zheh are not in correct order? Your database or your programming language should provide the sorting mechanism, or you should implement sorting yourself (as a database engine plug-in if it supports it, or in the programming language if it doesn't). We already have solutions for C, PHP, and PostgreSQL, but all are Linux-only, or possibly Cygwin (port of GNU tools to Windows). How do you represent these fields in HTML or ASP pages (converting them to HTML entity code dynamically, saving their entity codes, or whatever else)? As far as I can tell, you HTML doesn't have any notion of fields. If you mean the letters Peh, Gaf, Farsi Yeh, etc, they can be referenced in HTML pages as #x+hexcode+;. Farsi Yeh becomes #x06cc;, for example. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]SOS
On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Mohsen Pahlevanzadeh wrote: But i don't know that how type farsi in KDE or GNOME. Use Red Hat 8.0's KDE and GNOME. GNOME's 'gedit' support Persian, and also some of the KDE text editors (I can't remember which do). The Persian keyboard layout is also included in Red Hat 8.0 if you install it, but you may need to install fonts of your own, which you may get from your Windows fonts directory, or download some from: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ I also have a post about enabling the Persian keyboard in Red Hat 7.3's KDE at: http://lists.sharif.edu/pipermail/farsikde/2002-June/000369.html But I don't know if exactly the same procedure will work with Red Hat 8.0. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]basic question
On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Saber XP wrote: thanks for your reply. why i see your presentation show with error in medical YEH? what's the problem with my font(s)? I've to update them? (see attachment) Your fonts have bugs with Persian Yeh then. Try these: http://www.farsiweb.info/font/parsa.zip (Note that these are not standard compliant, they only fix the Persian Yeh bug.) 1- what's differences between U+06CC and U+0649 ? which one is default for YEH? U+06CC is the Persian Yeh. U+0649 is the Arabic Yeh that always has two dots under it, even in final and isolated forms. but both of them are dotless in Tahoma font, only U+064A have dots. Oh, My mistake! U+0649 in the Arabic Alef Maksura, and it should be dotless in all its forms (appearing as a single dandaane in medial and initial forms). Until Windows 2000, Microsoft's OpenType engine treated U+0649 as a right-joining letter only. I don't know what is the exact case about Windows and Office XP. 3- is tahoma the only standard font that supports uni code? That depends on how one defines a standard font. I mean the fonts that are built in in windows, not like NESF. and thanks for letting me know courier supports unicode. what about arial? and medical YEH problem in it. These Microsoft fonts from Windows 2000 support Persian letters of Unicode. That doesn't mean they don't have bugs, or they support is complete or standard: Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Tahoma, Traditional Arabic, Arabic Transparent, Arial Unicode, But they are more standard than Nesf. Nesf is only a temporary hack. I want to know except true type fonts are there any kind of fonts on the windows platform. Actually, OpenType is a superset of TrueType, and the politically correct term is that you should use OpenType from now on: TrueType is a dead specification. But Windows also support bitmap fonts (.FON) which can't support Persian Unicode. You can also get PostScript fonts if you install Adobe ATM, but PostScript fonts are worse for Persian. you may answer this email in mailing list, I avoid sending it to mailing list because there is an attachment. Did so. :) roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]FARSI HEH WITH YEH ABOVE (THE THING)
On Tue, 18 Jun 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, I would like to comply with the current standard, but am not able to find the U+0654 on any of the Unicode fonts that I know which are Arial Unicode MS, Tahoma, and Microsoft San Serif. Would someone please let me know of a standard Unicode font that will provide me with such char? Unfortunately I don't have a list, but we are working on some fonts which will definitely support it. But I don't guess you will be able to get them working on Windows 2000 as Windows 2000's layout engine just supports Unicode 2.0. I am working on finding a mechanism for replacing the engine with a newer one, also from Microsoft, that supports the HAMZA ABOVE character. Please note that trying to be standard-compliant on a platform with broken support, and without being able to fix it, is very hard. My recommendation is use anything that suits your users best, if you can't fix the underlying platform or write a layout engine for your application. Having a piece of *working* software is usually better than having a broken standard-compliant one. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]heh + hamzeh
On Sun, 2 Jun 2002, C Bobroff wrote: Ok, it seems that we are seeing a lot of monolouges here. I'm sure more people than just me are finding the monologues educational I just wish to emphasize that I have seen repetitions of the same concern. And I can't forget referring to some of us as dictators or things like that. (At least as people who try to impose their ideas on others.) Regarding the dictatorship things, I wish to emphasize that the matter of Heh+Hamza was also discussed at the ISIRI meeting for approval of the standard, and all of the experts agreed or got convinced. The list includes Dr Mostafa Asi (A computational linguist also working with Farhangestan), Mr Ebrahim Mashayekh (President of Informatics Society of Iran), Dr Mohammad Ghodsi (Project Leader of FarsiTeX), Mr Mohammad Azadnia (Technical manager of Persian project at Iran Communication Research Center), Mr Arash Rezaiizadeh (one of entrepreneurs of Windows Farsification), and Mr Arash Zeini (President of Chapar Shabdiz, the first Iranian Free Software company, also of FarsiKDE fame), and Mr Hashemi (Gam Electronic's Persian Expert). All other known experts, if present in Iran, were invited, but some could not attend: this includes people like Dr Mohammad San'ati of SinaSoft fame, whom Behdad and me met personally after the meeting, to make sure he does not have major objections. I can't understand who Abi was refering to, when she or he writes Next I expect we will be told how to combe out hair. [...] They have nothing to offer to the Persain IT and language discussion. Was he refering to me, or to Mr Khanban? (We are both members of the technical committee of the standard you heard a lot about.) To say the least, neither me nor Mr Khanban have anything to hide about what we have done for the Persian IT world: Just search Google for Khanban or Pournader. We both use our real and full names, and have done everything publicly. But who is Abi Lover? Also, quoting Abi's exact words, she or he is against any standardization: There are some people [...] who think that they have a duty to lay down rules for other people to follow. Unicode Consortium is doing this. ISO is doing this. W3C is doing this. Many software companies, from Microsoft to SinaSoft also do this, by creating things that will become de facto standards. You are not obliged to follow standards, but you will come to trouble if you don't. Noone will be able to use your software with other software. Roozbeh, can you please tell us about this normalization and why the mention of Persian is to be removed from this character? Sure. I have explained the problem a number of times, and I will explain it again: There is a notion in Unicode, called Normalization. You can read about it at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15/. If you don't have the time, I will brief you in short: Since Unicode is not just for displaying the text, but also for processing, and it sometimes has different alternatives for encoding the same text, you need to have some mechanism to find that two strings of characters are actually the same. One example, is the equivalence of U+0624 ARABIC LETTER WAW WITH HAMZA ABOVE, with the string U+0648, U+0654 which is ARABIC LETTER WAW, ARABIC HAMZA AOBVE. The algorithm is intelligent enough so it can detect the equivalence even if you put a FATHA between the WAW and the HAMZA, so WAW WITH HAMZA ABOVE, FATHA will be equal to both WAW, FATHA, HAMZA and WAW, HAMZA, FATHA. This equivalence is very important for security issues, and proper functioning of the software, but I won't get into the details. To say the least, this is an important part of the two most awaited standards, which are still a draft: Internationalized Domain Names, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-idna-09.tx where applications MUST do normalization before doing name lookup for a non-ASCII domain name, and Character Model for the World Wide Web, http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/ where all web authoring or web content generation software is REQUIRED to normalize the text of a web document before putting it on the wire. Getting back to our U+06C0 ARABIC LETTER HEH WITH SMALL YEH ABOVE, this letter is specified to be equal to U+06D5, U+0654, which is ARABIC LETTER AE, ARABIC HAMZA ABOVE. This AE things, is a letter similiar to HEH in shape, but only used in Final and Isolated forms, something like U+0629 ARABIC LETTER TEH MARBUTA but without the dots. (I think that everyone agrees that this AE letter has no place in Persian.) Now let's consider the real sitation: one likes to encode this ezaafe thing. He may look at the charts, and he will either choose U+06D5, or U+0647, U+0645 (HEH, HAMZA ABOVE), based on his preference for precomposed or decomposed forms. Let me say that you choose the first, and I choose the second. The sad point will be that no Unicode compliant application will be able to tell you that these string are
Re: [farsiweb]Re: Farsi heh + hamzeh
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 ezafeh. Now we have been told how to write the hamzeh. 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 vela^yate 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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
Re: [farsiweb]ask for unicode
On Mon, 20 May 2002, mohammad mohebbi wrote: i store farsi names in a field of SQL server table, if i sort this field , will sorted by farsi order? As far as I know, the answer is no. Arash Rezaiizadeh and me are trying to convince Microsoft to add a Persian sorting table, but before that, you should sort Persian with your own code. roozbeh ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb] Opting out
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 ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
[farsiweb] Standard keyboard DLL for XP
FYI. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 17:11:34 +1000 From: Saied Tahaghoghi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: The FarsiWeb Project [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Standard keyboard DLL for XP [...] I previously used your keyboard DLL for win2k; yesterday I tried it out on XP-Pro, with success. The steps are pretty identical, with the exception of Step 9: Copy the file to C:\Windows\System32 [Confirm File Replace] This folder already contains a file named 'kbdfa.dll' Would you like to replace the existing file ...? -Select Yes. [Windows File Protection] Files that are required for Windows to run properly have been replaced by unrecognized versions. To maintain system stability, Windows must restore the original versions of these files. Insert your Windows XP Professional CD-ROM now. - Select Cancel [Windows File Protection] You chose not to restore the original versions of the files. This may affect Windows stability. Are you sure you want to keep these unrecognized file versions? - Select Yes Yours, Saied. ___ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
