[Bug 11753] Re: Arabic support severely broken

Munzir Taha (منذر طه) munzirtaha at newhorizons.com.sa
Thu May 11 14:16:43 UTC 2006


Thanks Daniel for your care and quick response.
To make everyone happy is impossible but I would try ;)

Ideally we need a font that supports the range 600-6FF to cover all the
languages based on the Arabic alphabet (Arabic, Persian, Urdu, ...).
kacst and arabeyes fonts covers only one language and almost all cover
part of the range U+615 - U+066D so none of them is useful as a default
as far as I understand.

DejaVuSans contains alphabets for Arabic, Persian and Urdu. At least it
contains characters: 615, 61B, 61F, 621 - 63A, 0640-0655, 660-66F,
679-687, 691, 698, 6A1, 6A4, 6A6, 6A9, 6AF, 6B1, 6BF, 6CC, 6F0, 6F9
which covers the main arabic characters and adds the four letters of the
Persian alphabet and some Urdu characters too. It's missing some
characters but it's the best option available now.

To improve upon this situation this font should contain more of the
unicode range like it's counterpart Arial Unicode MS. I would also
propose that kacst and arabeyes fonts should get rid of the English
characters in their fonts. There are mere replication of the same latin
letters in all their fonts which is redundant (performance issues) and
would prevent a fallback to another English font if they are chosen in
webpages and text editors. If you accept this I would organize it with
kacst to edit their fonts and Mohammed Elzubeir can do the same for
arabeyes.

still, the bug filed here has nothing to do with a default font. DejaVu
Sans works but most of the other fonts don't. So we need this to be
fixed so people who didn't like DejaVu for whatever reason could choose
their own fonts.

-- 
Arabic support severely broken
https://launchpad.net/bugs/11753




More information about the desktop-bugs mailing list