[vlc-devel] [PATCH] freetype: render Arabic diacritics properly

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

On 06 Jan, Salah Shaaban wrote :
> I actually selected this range based on Arabic keyboards. If you look in
> the unicode charts there are probably hundreds of such diacritics, most of
> which I haven't even heard of :)

:D

> Some of them, I guess, are archaic. Others are used only in holy scriptures
> (the Koran).

Not surprised. (Btw, I thought the official way in English was to write
Quran).

> The Hamza on the other hand is so common it's actually not a diacritic on
> keyboards, instead you find (Alef with Hamza above) and (Alef with Hamza
> below) but it's actually a single character. You can't, say, delete the
> Hamza and leave the Alef.

Ah, that makes sense then. Once again, my lack of Arabic knowledge
limited me. I thought Hamza was a diacritic in some cases.

> There is also another range much like the one I specified in the patch,
> which is specified in the "Arabic Presentation Forms-B" unicode chart
> (FE70–FEFF), it's redundant, and I haven't encountered any of its
> characters so far. And there it says:
> 
> "Preferred characters are found in the Arabic block 0600 -
> 06FF. Some of these characters are used for Arabic
> mathematics where contextual shape variations are
> important semantically."
> 
> It's actually rather confusing.

Of course not! It's Unicode, UTF-8, Bidirectional and glyphs, how could
it be confusing? :D :)

> The range specified in the patch seems to handle all subtitle files I find
> on the Internet.

Thanks a lot.

Now, we need a way to fallback from the main fonts on Windows, and all
will be cool for Arabic users.

With my kindest regards,

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
http://www.jbkempf.com/ - +33 672 704 734
Sent from my Electronic Device