[HarfBuzz] [p-c] Perso-Arabic symbols for "year"

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Khaled,

I think I now have a solution to this problem.  You can use 'rtlm'/'ltrm' to
choose different behavior based on the direction the shaper ended up appyling
features.  You may want to apply your font.

Let me know if this works.

behdad

On 06/11/2012 09:01 AM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> BTW, I came across this picture from six years ago, before Unicode had fixed
> the bidi category of the Arabic number sign:
> 
>   https://secure.flickr.com/photos/behdad/107995524
> 
> I still have no idea how to fix it in HarfBuzz without breaking other stuff...
> 
> 
> 
> On 06/04/2012 02:16 AM, Connie Bobroff wrote:
>> Khaled,
>> Thanks and congratulations. The new Amiri works great on Firefox. All 4 digits
>> are nicely above the Arabic Number Sign. (Just note that if the right-most
>> digit is "8", the bottom, right portion collides with the Arabic Number Sign a
>> bit. But no big deal.
>> I think the other points, many of which are critical issues, need to be taken
>> up in a separate thread. Please hang on.
>>
>>
>>  
>> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org
>> <mailto:khaledhosny at eglug.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 08:26:47AM +0530, Connie Bobroff wrote:
>>     > Khaled,
>>     > Yes, please send the version of Amiri that works on Firefox. The latest
>>     version
>>     > from SourceForge works very nicely on IE but not Firefox.
>>
>>     File attached.
>>
>>     > Amiri is nice in that it's relatively the same size as Tahoma and
>>     > therefore, much more suitable for web use than the others.
>>
>>     That is by design, almost all Arabic fonts are ridiculously too small
>>     compared to Latin for reason beyond me, making it impossible to use the
>>     same point size for Arabic and non-Arabic text.
>>
>>     > (However, for this particular project, unfortunately, I won't be able
>>     > to use it since the Heh Goal is not the right shape to match the old
>>     > style manuscript.)
>>
>>     This was intentional, IMO many of the variant Arabic letters in Unicode
>>     are really stylistic variants specific to certain calligraphic style
>>     commonly used for certain languages, Heh Goal is such an example, it is
>>     a Nastliq-style variant of the regular Heh and a calligrapher writing
>>     Heh this way will do so even when writing Arabic or any other language
>>     using Arabic script, the same applies for the so-called Keheh or Farsi
>>     Kaf which is really a Nastaliq Kaf, and Arabic calligraphers writing in
>>     Nastaliq use that very same Kaf. So for Amiri, being a Naskh style font,
>>     I decided that this variance makes no sense and does not match the
>>     design so I ignored it, however if there is evidence of manuscripts in
>>     Naskh style making that distinction I'll happily follow it.
>>
>>     > I did not quite see until now these "Advanced Features" on SIL which say how
>>     > many digits the font allows:
>>     > http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=ArabicFonts
>>     > Probably there should be a discussion somewhere about using "Arabic Number
>>     > Sign" for dates and therefore needing 4 digits. I presume "Arabic Sign
>>     Samvat"
>>     > will be given 4 digits but as I said, it's the wrong shape at least for
>>     me in
>>     > this project.
>>
>>     The problem is that I don’t really know what is the intended use of the
>>     Arabic number sign, the available Unicode proposals that supposedly lead
>>     to its
>>     inclusion do not say much about it:
>>     http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2413.htm
>>
>>     This page says it is “used to indicate the beginning of a number” which
>>     does not say much either, but suggests it takes an arbitrary number
>>     digits, so I extended Amiri’s number sign to accept 4 digits:
>>     http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/urdu/
>>
>>     Regards,
>>      Khaled
>>
>>     > -Connie
>>     >
>>     > On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at behdad.org
>>     <mailto:behdad at behdad.org>> wrote:
>>     >
>>     >     On 06/03/2012 12:19 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>>     >     > This have been fixed in FontForge’s master branch, it will break
>>     feature
>>     >     > files expecting the older behaviour, but there is not much we can do
>>     >     > here, and it is hardly the only incompatible fix to FontForge’s
>>     feature
>>     >     > file code since the last release.
>>     >
>>     >     Thanks Khaled.  I still don't have any idea how to correctly handle
>>     these
>>     >     sequences in HarfBuzz, but will experiment with Uniscribe, try to
>>     see if I
>>     >     can
>>     >     figure out what it's doing.
>>     >
>>     >     behdad
>>     >
>>     >
>>
>>
>