[Localization] Arabic Projects

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:44:07AM -0400, Nicholas Bodley wrote:
> It is easy to position individual Arabic letters in RtoL sequence, leaving small
> spaces between letters, but the result, I'm essentially sure, looks very bad; it
> would definitely not be acceptable in an XO! (Apparently Arabic typewriters
> created rather wretched-looking text; I'd love to know.)

Arabic typewriters used what so called "Simplified Arabic script" where
each letter has only 2 forms (on used as isolated and final, and the
other as initial and medial) reducing the number of needed glyph while
remaining acceptably readable.

> Arabic text in computer form could simply specify each letter is sequence, with
> no regard to which of the four forms is to be used; however, to simplify the
> process of rendering somewhat, "combining forms" are offered in Unicode (or
> were!) -- see Arabic Presentation Forms, A and B,
> Unicode ranges U+FB50--U+FDFF (A) and U+FE70--U+FEFF. (This was Unicode 3; sorry
> if I mislead.)
> Apparently, these simplify the process of rendering decent Arabic, although
> (fairly sure) they are not a completely-acceptable solution.

This isn't needed any more, in the era of "smart fonts" most script
complexities were moved to font rather than encoding domain, all what
you need are Arabic OpenType fonts and an OpenType capable engine
(Pango, Uniscripe, etc..)

> It would seem reasonable to expect an Urdu XO to offer a simpler, but
> linguistically correct form of Urdu script. I must respectfully bow out of the
> room and listen, though, because I just don't know.

I'd not call it "Urdu script" since Nastaliq is one of several
traditional Arabic calligraphy styles, and though commonly preferred in
Iran and India/Pakistan, it is used all over the Arabic region. In turn
Urdu and Farsi can be very well written using Naskh or other modern
computer fonts and it is even preferred for maximum readability.

> Referring to computer typesetting of Arabic, Scientific American magazine
> published an excellent article (roughly 1992?) about computer typesetting of
> Arabic. Proper typesetting of Arabic cannot be done mechanically; it requires a
> computer.

If by "mechanically" you mean metal type, then Arabic printing houses as
early as 1800's produced very carefully typeset Arabic book that we yet
to have a computer system that can imitate.

> As I see it, fortunately, any OS (or family of them) that's "serious" has pretty
> well settled down so it can properly support rendering Arabic; my semi-informed
> guess is that Sugar for different OSes will need some individual code for each OS
> to support the available rendering libraries.

Pango on Linux does the rendering on its own, while it can use Uniscripe
and AAT on Windows and OS X respectively.

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team
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