On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 02:05:01PM +0100, Otared Kavian wrote:
Hi Hans, Khaled, and Idris,
If a humble opinion from an ordinary user may be issued, I agree with Khaled that it would be extremely useful to have some basic default settings for Arabic fonts, and even more generally for any particular fonts used for other languages. This would not prevent those specialist typesetters who want particular features to be turned on, to do so through appropriate mechanisms.
As a basic user I am frustrated when using mkiv, that most declaration of features are completely cryptic, and not being a specialist of OTF or other font specifications, I don't know which features are essential for writing and typesetting an article in Persian or any language using Arabic alphabet.
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 Should be all what I user need to get an Arabic page. I can even imaging a script analyzer in MkIV that classifies input text and applies fonts/font features per script (Pango kinda does this), with may be some high level commands like: \setupbodyfont[arabic=foo,latin=bar] Which specifies the default font per script. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team