Re: [NTG-context] Luatex (actually Aleph) and Bidi_Mirrored chars in RTL mode

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 01:50:35PM -0600, Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:44:19 -0600, Khaled Hosny wrote:

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Get SC unipad and type identical logical input in Arabic and Farsi modes. The makers of Unipad are Iranian and they implement both Arabic and Farsi rules correctly, have keyboards etc. AFAIK, no other editor implements the bidi alg as well.

I didn't use Unipad that much, but I think Gedit (GTK pased) does a perfect job,

No, it does not ;-)

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I'm not aware of any windows port of it though.

andLinux on W32 is wonderful, no more cygwin etc.

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I'd like to know what features in Unipad (regarding Arabic) that Gedit hasn't.

One example:

The following comes out correctly in Unipad, also in Opera's email composer (don't know how it will look in your client). It does not come out right in Windows Notepad or in gedit. Kate does get it right (and other kde apps as well), as well as OOo:

============== European: 18%, 1--3

Arabic: ١٨٪، ١--٣

Farsi: ۱۸٪، ۱--۳ ==============

Oh, it is shame that even my terminal (mlterm) renders it right! I think I'm going to report this :)

See attached as well.

Unipad is designed as a complete unicode utility, and has lots of other nifty features as well, especially for editing Arabic script. Its Arabic-script editing features are truly unique and useful. Eg, I select/edit vowels horizontally not vertically.

Unipad has:

Char Info bar: character code value (U+0000) character name (if assigned) character category (letter, decimal digit, etc.) character block (script, collection, etc.)

Extended Char Info bar: decimal character code value encoded byte sequence (octals) bidirectional character type decimal digit value (only if the character represents a decimal digit)

Unipad is not a good choice for a programmer's or TeX editor, but in overall unicode editing it is unrivalled, although it has not been updated since Unicode 4.1.0 :-(

Fortunately, thanks to WINE, it does run under Linux, even their web site lists WINE as one of the supported platforms. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team