Re: Making necessary OpenType features on by default

[Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org>]

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On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 03:44:13PM -0700, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:03:56 -0700, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org>  
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> Fonts will always be complicated... for what you are describing we need 
> to start with a default Arabic-script font for TeX, like LM for Latin. My 
> suggestion is to make Scheherazade that font, since it is free,  
> distributable, and supports nearly all Arabic script languages. We could  
> make two settings:
>
> one for Scheherazade as the LM fallback for the needed Ar-script ranges  
> for unicode,
>
> another for Scheherazade as the main font, with Termes as Latin fallback. 
> That will give us a benchmark from which to proceed with other fonts. If 
> I get time I'll try to build typescripts etc for this scenario, or Khaled 
> or someone else can take on this task, and I'll review it.
>
> Even Scheherazade has lots of options, and it will take some research to  
> get the "ideal" default even here.

I'm not very fond if Scheherazade as it has many wrong glyphs (most of
the Quranic glyphs are completely wrong) and it doesn't even have an الله
ligature, which most Arabic users won't accept. I was experimenting with
a modified version that fixes those issues, but I gave up since the font
lacks any contextual forms but the basic four ones and extending the
font the way it is designed proved to be cumbersome and very error
prone.

If it is needed, I can clean the font and provide it to be included in
the minimal distribution temporarily, as I hope that we'll have a viable
alternative by the end of this year.

Regards,
 Khaled


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

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