From: Tomas F. <to...@fr...> - 2002-03-23 11:03:14
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I want restate the point I made a couple of days ago which was not picked up. A proper shaping library should be able to do the shaping for the entire Unicode space, not just Arabic. This cannot be done without messing with OpenType fonts, because the general intention of the Unicode consortium is that Unicode be a semantically defined code set, i.e., without presentation forms, only one code point per letter. Arabic has been assigned presentation forms only because of legacy issues, other code pages were not. Now, I can use FriBidi for all of these sets, legacy or not, but if we add an Arabic-only shaping engine on the top of it, I will still need some other shaping engine beside it that will do the job for the non- legacy code pages too, leaving the Arabic-only shaping engine superflous. Conditional compilation is not a good solution here, because I will possibly be linking against FriBidi already installed on the users system, rather than providing my own version of FriBidi with the application. So, yes, I want a good Arabic shaping engine based on the presentation forms to use with AbiWord in very near future, but I do not want it loaded just because I linked against FriBidi, because one day I expect to do the shaping using the FreeType Layout library, and I will still then need to use FriBidi to do my bidi layout. Tomas |