[xep-support] Arabic-range numbers

[Reynolds-Gregg]

Hi David,
 
That's very welcome news, although I do rather look forward to hacking some fonts around (piece of cake with http://www.fontlab.com tools; now I finally have something to do with the tool I bought a few years ago when I had a few extra bucks. ;)
 
FYI, and as further incentive, the client for my project is an agency of a Middle Eastern government.  I happen to be the only person on the project dorked out on XML and friends for document production.  If my little project goes well I'll be in a good position to at least make the clients (as well as my own company) aware of the benefits of an XML/XSL architecture.  Naturally the better XEP supports Arabic the easier it is for me to make the case.
 
XEP needs to support:
 
1.  Arabic number letterforms starting at Unicode x0660
2.  Arabic decimal separator, which looks like a comma
3.  Arabic "abjadia" enumerating - widely used for enumerating e.g. 1-a, 1-b, etc. - contact me if you need a full listing of abjadia
4.  Use of Arabic hyphening in enumerations like 1-a, 1-b, etc.
 
Also, I'm having two other problems with XEP Arabic support.  They look like bugs, but I haven't fully investigated yet; in any case they are problems.
 
The big problem is that diacritics do not appear to be working properly.  They should behave as combining chars, stacked on top (or below) the base char.  Instead I'm seeing them positioned as if they were ordinary chars.  This causes a break in the ligature between linked letterforms, which is totally unacceptable.  I don't see the same thing where the same font is used in other software, so I conclude tentatively that XEP is doing something wrong.  The workaround is to not use any diacritics, which I can live with in the short term but is a definite drawback.  Let me know if you'd like a few screen shots illustrating this.
 
The other thing I'm seeing is spacing after the period in Arabic text.  There is none.  Again I haven't had time to investigate this, so it may not be an XEP bug, but it sure looks like it.  I assume there will be an FO workaround for this.
 
BTW, what's the projected delivery date for the next version?
 
Thanks,
 
Gregg Reynolds
 

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: David Tolpin [mailto:dvd at davidashen.net] 
	Sent: Sat 10/23/2004 3:13 PM 
	To: xep-support at renderx.com 
	Cc: 
	Subject: Re: [xep-support] Arabic-range numbers
	
	

	Reynolds-Gregg:
	[ Charset UTF-8 unsupported, converting... ]
	> Of course the obvious simple solution hit me this morning: hack the font.
	> Just move the Arabic glyphs into the Latinate codepoints.   The nice thing is
	> this would also work for traditional counting like abjadia and iroha.
	
	Hi Gregg,
	
	RenderX is going to do this in the normal way by the next release;
	at least I have an evidence that someone needs it.
	
	David
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