===== Original Message From "Adam Lindsay" ===== Idris Samawi Hamid said this at Sat, 9 Apr 2005 19:27:21 -0600:

...

While we will still need huge fonts, the processing of complicated accents should be much faster with the approach I have in mind (smaller otp's and ovf's).

It sounds a bit tricky with the eTeX line, because of the 256-character- per-TeX-font limit.

Aleph gives us 64,000-characters/font plus etex so that's not a problem. But with some font/otp creativity we can still get some rather small fonts (compared to the 10,000-character ovfs I'm using now...)

Not necessarily impossible, but certainly contortionate. I'm led to think about XeTeX--a fair number of people on the list are happy with the AAT/OpenType support they get with some very sophisticated Arabic fonts.

If you can have one of your friends send me some pdf samples, that would be nice. I am especially interested in accent handling over ligatures. OTOH, I have yet to see a normal Arabic-script font with a full accent palette plus a very complete set of ligatures (except mine of course->) Yes, there are certainly some (outrageously expensive) Mac programs that come with really beautiful and complete calligraphy Arabic fonts; I'll have to have a look at those one day...

And when you consider the educational price of a Mac mini, you're still way below the price of some software packages... :)

I'll look into it (Hans made a similar suggestion to me a few days ago), though my own goal with my Arabic-script package is platform independence. OTOH, aleph has much better bidi/large font/transcription support than pdfetex. Maybe I will come to a TeX conference and lobby for integration of these two. Then all will be well in the world... Best Idris ============================ Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523