On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 02:05:01PM +0100, Otared Kavian wrote:
> Hi Hans, Khaled, and Idris,
>
> If a humble opinion from an ordinary user may be issued, I agree with  
> Khaled that it would be extremely useful to have some basic default  
> settings for Arabic fonts, and even more generally for any particular  
> fonts used for other languages. This would not prevent those specialist 
> typesetters who want particular features to be turned on, to do so 
> through appropriate mechanisms.
>
> As a basic user I am frustrated when using mkiv, that most declaration  
> of features are completely cryptic, and not being a specialist of OTF or 
> other font specifications, I don't know which features are essential for 
> writing and typesetting an article in Persian or any language using 
> Arabic alphabet.

I totally agree with you, more ever I hop that at some point in the
future, just selecting certain language will be enough to get proper
display of it, some thing like:

\mainlanguage[arabic]
\startext
أهلا بالعالم!
\stoptext

Should be all what I user need to get an Arabic page.
I can even imaging a script analyzer in MkIV that classifies input text
and applies fonts/font features per script (Pango kinda does this), with
may be some high level commands like:

\setupbodyfont[arabic=foo,latin=bar]

Which specifies the default font per script.

Regards,
 Khaled


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