On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 08:28:41 +0000 Martin J. Dürst via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Basic Arabic shaping, at the level of a typewriter, is > > straightforward enough to leave to a terminal emulator, as Eli has > > suggested. Lam-alif would be trickier - one cell or two? > > Same for other characters. A medial Beh/Teh/Theh/... (ببب) in any > reasonably decent rendering should take quite a bit less space than a > Seen or Sheen (سسس). I remember that the multilingual Emacs version > mostly written by Ken'ichi Handa (was it called mEmacs or nEmacs or > something like that?) had different widths only just for Arabic. In > Thunderbird, which is what I'm using here, I get hopelessly > stretched/squeezed glyph shapes, which definitely don't look good. It's a long time since I last knowingly read typewritten Arabic script, but on reading the description of Haddad's design of the Arabic typewriter, I see what you mean. My point is correct, but your point is another argument for having single- and double-width characters. Richard.
