خالد حسني أَنَا الّذِي نَظَرَ الأَعْمَى إِلَى أَدَبِي وَأَسْمَعَتْ كَلِمَاتِي مَنْ بِهِ صَمَمُ

إذا كنت تستخدم توزيعة جنو/لينكس حديثة (أوبونتو ٩,٠٤ أو أي توزيعة تحتوي xkeyboard-config-1.5 و libx11-1​.1.5 أو أحدث) فستلاحظ أن أزرار لام ألف على لوحة المفاتيح تعمل ثانية، لكن في تطبيقات جتك+ (جنوم إلخ.) ستجد أنها لا تتصل ببقية الحروف، نفس المشكلة القديمة.

It has been long since last time I posted here, and there has been many recent developments.

I started a project to for digitisation of the standard Arabic typeface developed and used by Al-Amiria printing in Cairo from around 20s to 70s of the last century that was widely used in other governmental printing houses as well. The project has been funded by TUG, see the google code page of the project for more details (and if you want to donate to the project ;).)

أعمل حاليا على إضافة التنويعات المختلفة من الحروف التي تتغير حسب السياق إلي خط "النسخ المبسط"، لاحظت صدفة أن الياء المتطرفة تكاد تكون الحرف الوحيد الذي لا يقبل إلا إضافة كل تنويعاته الممكنة.

بعض التنويعات المختلفة من الياء المتطرفة حسب الحرف السابق عليها، حرف مزعج :)

Scribus 1.3.5 (not released yet), has support for using TeX for text rendering via a special LaTeX frame.

I grabbed it from svn, built it, some quick configuration to use xelatex instead of pdflatex, and the result is the screenshot above :).

Now, I need to polish this and make a good configuration file for ArabXeTeX (that I'm using on top of XeTeX engine).

Testing Arabic support in maemo (this is maemopad, and the font is my working version of Mothanna font).

I built an Arabic language pack for Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (originally based on Arabeyes translation, but completed and revised).

It can be downloaded from here. Feedback is welcomed.

Update: I've updated the file several times, to fix various problems, since this post, please download it again.

The upcoming beta3 of firefox 3 with Arabic interface, it deserve the extra effort put into it. Thanks to every one contributed to this translation (and a big thanks to me :p).

Get tinderbox builds from here if you can't wait for the release (like me). I still hate firefox, however.

UPDATE: Beta 3 officially released, get it from here.

Update: I rewrote this port and changed its title from Pango vs. FriBiDi, as people misunderstood my point.

We have at least two free software libraries that are capable of doing Arabic shaping, Pango and the FriBiDi (fribidi-0.19 only).

Smart fonts are fonts that is accompanied by instructions that define how glyphs are selected to be laid out, in contrast dumb fonts does not contain such instructions and the text is laid out by simple character to glyph mapping.

WebKit-r29336 using Pango for font rendering, enabling Arabic and other complex text rendering.