Re: Unicode Arabic Rendering Problem

From: Muhammad Asif (mdasif@wol.net.pk)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 01:45:00 EST

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    It seems to be encoding problem, as mentioned by tang. If you choose
    Microsoft Sans Serif (or tahoma) fonts and encoding suggested by tang it
    will work fine.

    Asif

    At 10:05 AM 2/28/2003 -0800, Mete Kural wrote:
    >Hello Folks,
    >
    >I wanted to ask a question to those of you who have
    >Unicode Arabic knowledge. We have this website
    >http://www.quranreader.org where we are trying to
    >display the text of the Quran with accurately encoded
    >Unicode text rather than the traditional images. Some
    >of the characters in the Quran aren't rendered
    >correctly. We are letting the browser to use its
    >default Unicode font on the website, which is Times
    >New Roman Unicode for the newer versions of Internet
    >Explorer I think. If we used a high-quality Unicode
    >font for Arabic, would this solve the problem? Or is
    >this a bigger problem that has to do with the
    >rendering engine provided by the operating system?
    >
    >I would like to give you an example. In Arabic when
    >you have a Lam And Alef together, it is rendered in a
    >unique way instead of the regular rendering for these
    >letters that kind of looks like this:
    >
    > \ /
    > \/
    > /\
    > \/
    >Figure 1
    >
    >In the Quran, there is sometimes this combination of
    >characters: Lam-Hamza-Alif
    >In such a case, the Lam and Alif are still rendered
    >the way they would be had there not been a hamza
    >inbetween, and the hamza is simply put above the alef
    >and lam in the middle which looks kind of like this:
    >
    > c
    > \ /
    > \/
    > /\
    > \/
    >Figure 2
    >
    >Note that this is different than the case as
    >illustrated in Figure 3 where the hamza is directly
    >above the alef and not "in between" lam and alef.
    >
    >c
    > \ /
    > \/
    > /\
    > \/
    >Figure 3
    >
    >So there is a subtle difference that the hamza is not
    >directly above the alef but rather in between the alef
    >and the lam. I am attaching a small gif file named
    >"Sample.gif" that will demostrate the subtle
    >difference of the positioning of the hamza. Attached
    >are two words from the Quran. Look for the second word
    >where the hamza is in between the alef and the lam
    >instead of directly above the alef.
    >
    >When we encode this case with this combination of
    >Unicode characters: 0644-0627-0621
    >in Internet Explorer, instead of showing it like
    >Figure 2, it totally seperates all letters and shows
    >it like this:
    >
    >| |
    >| |
    >| C \__/
    >
    >which is totally wrong.
    >
    >Which one do you think is the problem here?
    >
    >1) We are not encoding this combination of characters
    >in the correct way.
    >2) This is a font-related problem.
    >3) This is a bigger problem for which the rendering
    >engine on the operating system has to be modified.
    >
    >Thank you very very much,
    >Mete Kural
    >
    >



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