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

[Khaled Hosny]

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> 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
> 
> 
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