On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 07:34:00AM +0530, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote: > > > On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:15:13PM +0530, Venkatesan. S.K. (TNQ) wrote: > > I suppose these are early days for unicode, especially for Indic, Hebrew > and > > Arabic. > > I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "early" here, but Arabic > have been part of Unicode since 1.1 (cr. 1993), bidi algorithm even > predates Unicode. > > Regards, > Khaled > > -- > Khaled Hosny > Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team > Free font developer > > > When Arabic and English and Tamil are mixed in UTF-8 I can demonstrate > interesting behaviors in gedit and other text editors. Many other text editors > just render them in byte order, like byte editors, which is fine...
I fail to see how having unreadable Arabic text would be fine, unless one don't intend to read that text of course. > It may not be early days for the Unicode specs, but the implementing > applications have been having finding it difficulty, not to mention that there GNU Fribidi (the bidi implementing library used by GTK+ and thus Gedit) have been first released in 1999, I'd not call that new either. > have been new characters and changes being constantly made in every Unicode > version, 5.1, 6.0, etc...The OS releases lag behind and where are the bloody > fonts that has implemented Unicode 6.0? It is a nightmare for implementors and > users. New characters added to Unicode has almost no effect in how bidi is handled by applications. > Do unicode committee have a proof of concept application (like Amaya browser > for W3 HTML) or a font? > It is possible create a font using all their PDFs but license will be problem, > I suppose... > Each and every OS and editors show different levels of compliance... Sorry, I don't see what fonts have to do with the issue we are discussing here (whatever this issue actually is, you don't say what difficulties you see/have). There are already free fonts covering all RTL characters in Unicode, and more are being developed (I'm working on one right now myself). > Apart from all this, there are the users who are used to WYSIWYG paradigm and > get very confused when there are different outputs in XML editors and the PDF > output. > We have had interesting problems where book authors used Arabic/Hebrew in an > insensitive version of MS Word that doesn't switch right to left and they want > the output that way and when we open it an recent version of MS Word or the > other way around, we get very interesting emails and discussions. I generally > tell them please send me a PDF and tell me what is exactly you want in the > output, we will take care of the XML. Of course, if you use a non-Middle-East > version of InDesign then right to left will not work; I suppose InDesign folks > think that Arabic should not be used non-Middle-East folks... Still, I'm not understanding what are the problem here, and how it is related to TeX. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
