Arabic-L:GEN:OS X responses

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 15 Jan 2003
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject:OS X response: font bug
2) Subject:OS X response: punctuation placement
3) Subject:Dil responds to #2
4) Subject:OS X response from people at Apple (wow!)
4) Subject:OS X response: Opera renders Arabic better

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1)
Date:  15 Jan 2003
From: dparvaz at mac.com
Subject:OS X response: font bug

> The problem, and this has been pointed out by previous writers, is
> that the separate shapes of letters, all those not connected to any
> other, are both smaller and less bold than all the other letters.
> This gives a bizarre, almost goofy, look to the text.

I can't figure it out, either. All I can say is keep using the "bug"
button in the Safari toolbar and keep telling them to get the rendering
right.

In fact, the only browser that doesn't have this bizarre unconnected
glyph problem is Opera. It may be that some sort of kluge will be
required to artificially increase the size of those glyphs, which when
shrunk will look normal.

Silly errors.

-Dan.

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2)
Date:  15 Jan 2003
From: Waheed Samy <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject: OS X response: punctuation placement

Dil, I remember getting the same effect creating Arabic html documents
in Notepad.  If I remember correctly, it was possible to fix this by
inserting the direction tag <RTL>, then the period would jump to the
end of the line instead of appearing at the very beginning of the html
document.

I think this effect is caused by Arabic punctuation marks having
different values and being stored at different addresses in the
encoding scheme.  So it may be that the application you are using does
not recognize/indicate that you are using Arabic punctuation.

At any rate, this suggests that the application you are used (text
edit?) still needs refinement

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3)
Date:  15 Jan 2003
From: Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject: Dil responds to #2

I found a way to check this out and it turns out Waheed is right.  I
saved the .rtf TextEdit document, and then looked at it in BBEdit,
which allows me to see the underlying .rtf code.  Before (and for some
reason after) every correctly placed punctuation mark was hex 200F
(html unicode &#8207) which is the RTL mark.  I was pretty happy to
discover this, since I thought it would be an easy matter to insert
this mark myself, and get the punctuation to appear correctly in
TextEdit.  Unfortunately, the Show Character Palatte utility that
allows you to insert unicode into text specifically "greys  out" the
small section that would allow one to insert the RTL or the LTR mark
easily.  I can think of a hard way of doing it (saving as .rtf,
bringing it up in bbedit, inserting code, saving again, bringing it
back up in TextEdit) but it is too much of a hassle to really be a
solution.
Dil

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4)
Date:  15 Jan 2003
From: Tom Emerson <tree at basistech.com>
Subject: OS X response from people at Apple

I forwarded Dil's observations on Safari and TextEdit to some
colleagues at Apple and got the following response:

---
This is interesting feedback. I've already reported the problem with
the letter shapes.

About the question, I suspect that  when copying into TextEdit, there
might be associated directional information that makes the punctuation
come out in the proper position. Without that information, Text Edit
current assumes left-to-right and there are some known bugs even with
that.
---

Hence it would appear that Apple is aware of the glyph shaping issues
and are working to improve bidi support in Text Edit.

Share and enjoy.

     -tree

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5)
Date:  15 Jan 2003
From: Frederic Lagrange <fredlag at noos.fr>
Subject: Opera renders Arabic better

Dear Dil,
"Opera" actually does a much better job than safari as far as rendering
Arabic is concerned. Far from perfect, especially with alwaraq.com, in
which words are correctly shaped but in reverse order, but if you copy
them and paste them in text edit, it's perfect.

Frederic Lagrange.

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End of Arabic-L:  15 Jan 2003