Fwd: OLPC arabic

Hi Khaled,
              Thank you very much for the detailed description of the
problems. Unfortunately I'm totally snowed under at my day job for the
next 2.5 weeks. I hope Tomas Frydrich, the main author of the
rendering code can fix some of these issues. Otherwise I'll have a go
when things ease off at work.

We will get around to it and fix it though.

Thanks!

Martin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org>
Date: Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 1:31 AM
Subject: Re: OLPC arabic
To: Martin Sevior <msevior@gmail.com>
Cc: greg@laptop.org, abiword-dev <abiword-dev@abisource.com>, Mohamed
Sanad <mohameds.sanad@gmail.com>, Sayamindu Dasgupta
<sayamindu@gmail.com>

Sorry for the late reply.

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 09:57:27AM +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
> It also occurred to me that if either Gedit or OpenOffice get the
> Arabic rendering correct, I could simply look at the difference
> between those applications and AbiWord/Write to identify the mistakes
> we make.

OpenOffice has its own layout engine with its own set of bugs, we should
stick with Gedit for comparison.

Currently, we have to different problems with AbiWord, non is Arabic
specific.

1) OpenType rendering: Pango does OpenType layout very well, but AbiWord
some times fail to apply OpenType features witch result in non-joined
Arabic words. I've reported this upstream a year a ago (#11307) but got
no response so far. This isn't Arabic specific, it can be tested in
fonts that has fi, ffi, fl and like ligatures (DejaVu fonts for example)
and you will see that the ligatures aren't always applied.

2) The other issue is those random symbols instead of Arabic text, I
first thought that it is a problem with font fallback mechanism, but
this doesn't to be the case and I can't identify a regular pattern for
this. It occurs randomly with any text and can't tell when to expect it.

Regards,
 Khaled Hosny

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