[Fribidi-discuss] fribidi & arabic shaping

[Tomas Frydrych]

Hi Nadim,

> with Bidi (and
> fribidi in particular) the only three languages being addressed, at
> this point, are Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi

That is not the case, there are more bidi-requiring languages than 
Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi; the FriBidi data tables come directly 
from the UnicodeData.txt and cover the entire Unicode space. This 
makes FriBidi universally usable for what it does; at the moment 
you add Arabic shaping engine to it, it will cease to be. If I want to 
use FriBidi to do bidi layout for Syriac, for which it will not be able 
to do the shaping, I certainly do not want it to waste my resources 
by loading the shaping data for Arabic, that's why I want the 
shaping tables in a different binary from FriBidi itself. I imagine that 
if I design a Hebrew-only application and want to use FriBidi, I 
equally will not want to have shaping data for Arabic loaded by the 
library, it just does not make sense. Two separate libraries get 
around this -- this is why dynamically loaded libraries came into 
being, so that you can optimize the use of resources.

By all means, let's have the lightweight shaping library in the 
FriBidi distribution, but let it be in two separate binaries.

Tomas