[Fribidi-discuss] fribidi & arabic shaping

[Tomas Frydrych]

I want restate the point I made a couple of days ago which was not 
picked up. A proper shaping library should be able to do the 
shaping for the entire Unicode space, not just Arabic. This cannot 
be done without messing with OpenType fonts, because the 
general intention of the Unicode consortium is that Unicode be a 
semantically defined code set, i.e., without presentation forms, 
only one code point per letter. Arabic has been assigned 
presentation forms only because of legacy issues, other code 
pages were not.

Now, I can use FriBidi for all of these sets, legacy or not, but if we 
add an Arabic-only shaping engine on the top of it, I will still need 
some other shaping engine beside it that will do the job for the non-
legacy code pages too, leaving the Arabic-only shaping engine 
superflous. Conditional compilation is not a good solution here, 
because I will possibly be linking against FriBidi already installed 
on the users system, rather than providing my own version of 
FriBidi with the application.

So, yes, I want a good Arabic shaping engine based on the 
presentation forms to use with AbiWord in very near future, but I do 
not want it loaded just because I linked against FriBidi, because 
one day I expect to do the shaping using the FreeType Layout 
library, and I will still then need to use FriBidi to do my bidi layout.

Tomas