#8221 HIGH 8.2.0 (: We need better Arabic fonts

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#8221: We need better Arabic fonts
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   Reporter:  khaled         |       Owner:  cscott                
       Type:  defect         |      Status:  new                   
   Priority:  high           |   Milestone:  8.2.0 (was Update.2)  
  Component:  distro         |     Version:  not specified         
 Resolution:                 |    Keywords:  polish:8.2.0 csafor8.2
Next_action:  test in build  |    Verified:  0                     
  Blockedby:                 |    Blocking:  6808                  
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Comment(by khaled):

 Replying to [comment:15 sayamindu]:
 > I noticed two serious issues wrt numerals in these fonts
 >
 > 1. With the Mothanna font selected in Write, I get stars instead of
 digits
 The font doesn't contain any Latin characters or European digits, I think
 this is a bug in AbiWord's font substitution and fall back  mechanism
 (among its other bugs)

 > 2. With the Thabit font selected, I get Latin digits (1,2,3,4,5..)
 Thabit includes Latin glyphs from IBM's courier font, but if you type
 Arabic digits (Indo-Arabic) you'll get them.

 >
 > (2) happens in the mesh searchbar as well.

 This isn't clear to me, olpc Arabic keyboard layout has Arabic digits, if
 you switched the layout you should get Arabic digits.

 >
 > Khaled, is this intentional ? Moreover, I notice that in the Mothanna
 font (I opened it with a font-editor), there are a lot of star symbols
 (which look like place-holders to me).
 They are place holders to convince some software (Qt4) that the font
 supports Arabic, if those glyphs were empty Qt4 won't use the Arabic part
 of the font, though (because of the way this font is designed) I don't
 need them. However, those stars shouldn't appear in the output, otherwise
 it is a bug in the application.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8221#comment:16>
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