Re: [NTG-context] Making necessary OpenType features on by default

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 08:34:54AM -0700, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد wrote:

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:02:39 -0700, Khaled Hosny wrote:

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I'm not very fond if Scheherazade as it has many wrong glyphs (most of the Quranic glyphs are completely wrong) and it doesn't even have an الله ligature, which most Arabic users won't accept.

There is a hadith

لا يسقط الميسور بالمعسور

Scheherazade is certainly not perfect -- and I doubt I'll ever use it personally -- but it's the best freely available option we have. If I understand the license correctly, we can rename it and turn it into a project. You, Otared, and others are expressing the need for a standard, default interface, so let's start with this and build on it. If there is another pure opentype font that is better, let me know and I'll test it.

The key point is that SIL has taken care to support nearly every Arabic-script language, not just Arabic, so this gives us a platform that all Arabic-script users can use by default until other free fonts -- or a fork of Scheherazade -- become available.

I already have a fork, I just don't want to encourage people to use such aesthetically poor fonts, but as it seems to be the only solution at hand right now (especially the Unicode covering), I think I'll try to clean my font and publish it this week ISA.

BTW: There is an الله lig in Scheherazade -- rather unattractive, but it's there. Maybe you have an old version?

Sorry, yes it has one but is no better than not having one at all.

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I was experimenting with a modified version that fixes those issues, but I gave up since the font lacks any contextual forms but the basic four ones and extending the font the way it is designed proved to be cumbersome and very error prone.

I'm not sure if the VOLT sources are available, although I used a font-to-volt script that seems to have captured nearly everything. I guess you use FF but no matter: Just make a list of problems and the minimal -- as opposed to ideal -- set of recommended changes and one or both of us can work on this over the next few months.

FF does a great job here, it does read all lookups that I don't need VOLT sources so much.

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If it is needed, I can clean the font and provide it to be included in the minimal distribution temporarily, as I hope that we'll have a viable alternative by the end of this year.

See the above... make a list of errors in the font and we'll both work on it one way or other. Back to Lotus: I suggest to you and Otared the following project: develop Scheherazade into a free alternative to Lotus. Lotus is that is as close to a pure OpenType font as we are going to easily get. Although it supports less of Arabic-script unicode than Scheherazade, it is a standard in the Arabic-script publishing world. So if our default interface supports Lotus and Scheherazade out of the box, we will be well on our way to what you guys are looking for.

My initial idea was to extend Scheherazade in a similar way, but I gave up on this, there are so many similar glyphs in the Arabic Unicode block that a simple ligature like بي means 28 (Baa' forms) * 10 (Yaa' forms): 280 glyphs for one ligatures, I don't think this is a wise idea. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer