Serious problems with Arabic text rendering

[Hossein Noorikhah]

Hi,

Starting with version LibreOffice 3.6, we had some issues with Arabic text
rendering in LibreOffice. These issues got worse starting LO 4.0. I hoped
that patches which some developers provided [1], may fix the bugs. But
right now I'm using LO v4.1.2.3 and nearly most of the problems that have
been fixed in OpenOffice versions prior to 3.0 are now visible again.

For example these are serious and were all fixed prior to OpenOffice 3.0:

1. Text rendering cuts and continues out of the border. (attached picture 1)
2. Kashida placement in wrong position, in the free space between words
(attached picture 2)
3. Losing paragraph direction, making RTL paragraph LTR. (attached picture
2)

These not happen for every font, but using some popular fonts, these issues
are visible, for example using "Droid Arabic Naskh".

Some users reported that they were forced to downgrade LibreOffice to avoid
these issuses. We were working on localization before these problems, but
right now it is very important to have a correct rendering engine before
continuing UI translation.

Considering the fact that many languages like Persian and Urdu use Arabic
script, I think fixing bugs related to Arabic text rendering is important.

Thanks
Hossein

[1]
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=4c4b9db8bbaed7acd064a4015fabe784c4fbca21
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