[Fribidi-discuss] fribidi & arabic shaping

[Omer Zak]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

> > > The FriBidiEnv data structure has enough unassigned flags to
> > > accommodate the shaping options.
> 
> Sorry I wasn't able to find any info on FriBidiEnv (haven't looked into CVS,
> which is where I think it is), but if that is an environmental variable that
> a user ought to set, I would still suggest implementing a function variable
> as is noted above (ie. the NEW part above) to give the application ultimate
> control.  If its a struct, on the other hand, that's encompassed/controlled
> internally then great (the "Env" part threw me for a loop).
> 
> BTW: please don't forget to CC those included.

The FriBidiEnv related code exists (for now) only in the CVS.

By the way, as things now look, we could have called it FriBidiContext,
because this structure begins to fill a role similar to the Graphics
Context structure, which is used (in various forms) in various windowing
systems to store all options used for controlling graphics operations.

At any case, when discussing shaping options, let's keep in mind the
existence of the Pango library, which is responsible for actual text
rendering.  There are (and will be) other libraries, which use FriBidi and
add more language-specific operations.

The FriBidi library should be restricted to BiDi text ordering.  Another
library may be defined for text ordering and shaping in Arabic (and other
languages, which need this), and it will define an environment data
structure, which will include FriBidiEnv as a member.
                                             --- Omer
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