Re: Making necessary OpenType features on by default

["Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد" <ishamid@colostate.edu>]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:02:39 -0700, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org>  
wrote:

> 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.

There is a hadith

لا يسقط الميسور بالمعسور

Scheherazade is certainly not perfect -- and I doubt I'll ever use it  
personally -- but it's the best freely available option we have. If I  
understand the license correctly, we can rename it and turn it into a  
project. You, Otared, and others are expressing the need for a standard,  
default interface, so let's start with this and build on it. If there is  
another pure opentype font that is better, let me know and I'll test it.

The key point is that SIL has taken care to support nearly every  
Arabic-script language, not just Arabic, so this gives us a platform that  
all Arabic-script users can use by default until other free fonts -- or a  
fork of Scheherazade -- become available.

BTW: There is an الله lig in Scheherazade -- rather unattractive, but it's  
there. Maybe you have an old version?

> 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.

I'm not sure if the VOLT sources are available, although I used a  
font-to-volt script that seems to have captured nearly everything. I guess  
you use FF but no matter: Just make a list of problems and the minimal --  
as opposed to ideal -- set of recommended changes and one or both of us  
can work on this over the next few months.

I would also look at Lotus Light -- a simple/simplistic yet probably the  
most commonly used commercial traditional font in the Arabic and Farsi  
worlds -- as an ideal default font for general usage. Khaled, note that,  
although Lotus also has a few contextual forms, in practice it is  
generally used by publishers without them.

BTW: The above is solely for the purposes that Khaled and Otared are  
pointing out, viz, a default Very High Level Interface for default Arabic  
script, for use by the average user for general documents, and with  
little-to-no tweaking. Otherwise, Scheherazade is virtually useless for my  
own projects.

> 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.

See the above... make a list of errors in the font and we'll both work on  
it one way or other. Back to Lotus: I suggest to you and Otared the  
following project: develop Scheherazade into a free alternative to Lotus.  
Lotus is that is as close to a pure OpenType font as we are going to  
easily get. Although it supports less of Arabic-script unicode than  
Scheherazade, it is a standard in the Arabic-script publishing world. So  
if our default interface supports Lotus and Scheherazade out of the box,  
we will be well on our way to what you guys are looking for.

سلام
ادريس سماوي
Idris Samawi

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Shi`i Studies
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
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