Re: Arabic and character-cell terminals

From: Jeroen Hellingman (jehe@kabelfoon.nl)
Date: Fri Jun 04 1999 - 13:27:51 EDT


A very early character cell terminal for arabic used a monospace font for
arabic, with some special characters to serve as endings for the wide
characters,

I read in John Clews' Language Automation World Wide: One of the earliest
Arabic character sets to be used in several countries was ASV-CODAR or
CODAR-U which was developed primarily for typesetting applications at the
Institut d'Etudes et de Recherces pour l'Arabisation (IERA) in Rabat
(Morocco). This
involves a single form for each letter, except for that words ending with
these letters
take one of three final forms before a space. The CODAR-U system was also
used
in computers, notably the EURAB terminal developed by the European Space
Agency.

The book also includes pictures of the glyphs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank da Cruz <fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu>
To: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 18:40
Subject: Arabic and character-cell terminals

>This question is related to Unicode, even though it might not seem to be.
>
>Are there now, or have there ever been, character-cell terminals with
>Arabic keyboards and that display Arabic text on the screen? And if so,
>how are characters placed on the screen? --
>
> 1. All the same width (monospace).
>
> 2. Some normal (ASCII) width, others doublewidth (duospace).
>
> 3. Variable spaced.
>
>Of course most terminals are monospaced, but in Japan they are duospaced:
>ASCII width for Romaji, Katakana, and Hiragana; doublewidth for Kanji.
>As with Roman-alphabet terminals, the host application has a clear and
>unambiguous idea of how characters will line up on the screen, since the
>application and the terminal agree on the width conventions.
>
>Is a similar scheme used for Arabic, and if so, is there common agreement
>on which characters are single-width, and which ones are double?
>
>This question relates to Unicode in the design or selection of a Unicode
>font to be used in a multilingual terminal emulator.
>
>Thanks!
>
>- Frank
>



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