From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 10:04:00 EST
I forgot this excellent KACST font suite too, that seems to work now as a good
Pan-Arabic font, for use with Arabic, Urda, and Qag:
http://ceri.kacst.edu.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts-1.6.zip
Many styles available, great for Quran texts...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
To: "Antoine Leca" <Antoine10646@leca-marti.org>
Cc: "Unicode Mailing List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 2:19 PM
Subject: Re: Urdu Unicode website [Was: Novice question]
> On 25/03/2004 03:33, Antoine Leca wrote:
>
> > ...
> >
> >As Peter correctly noted from day 1, all this stuff is not very important,
> >since Urdu users really expect nastaleeq style, so either they are not using
> >Urdu support, or they use proprietary solutions which extent remains to be
> >explained by competent persons.
> >
> >
> >
> There are Unicode Nastaliq fonts available, although not from Microsoft.
> See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html#arabic; both of the links
> to fonts called nastaliq are currently broken, but one of them can be
> found at http://www.crulp.org/nafeesNastaleeq.html, see also
> http://www.crulp.org/Downloads/NafeesNastaleeq_Release_Notes.pdf. These
> are supposed to work with Windows, presumably with Uniscribe, but I
> don't know how well; there is a sample of in this PDF file. The
> Microsoft Urdu keyboard presumably produces the required characters.
>
> >>(and of course Windows 9x/ME which does not support easily
> >>multiple layouts,
> >>
> >>
> >
> >This is news to me.
> >What it does not support easily are other scripts like Gurmukhi or Bengali,
> >particularly on input ;-). Neither do the supplementary Arabic characters
> >needed for Urdu, for instance. For this very reason, one of the first
> >answers to the original question, made by Edward, correctly pointed out that
> >testing on 9x or 16-bit boxes would be probably useless.
> >
> >
> >
> I disagree. There is no reason why these scripts cannot be displayed on
> Windows 9x with IE 5.5 and later, and suitable fonts, installed. See
> "Display" below.
>
> >>and where Tavulesoft Keyman is probably a good solution).
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Tavultesoft (<URL:http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/>). I do not know the
> >extent of it. I am not competent this about. Their home page does not seem
> >to target specifically at the Urdu market, and historically they did not.
> >So I have no clue about the real extent of this solution to type Urdu into
> >IE/Gecko/Opera on 9x. I am not even sure it is really helpful (have to see
> >with WM_UNICHAR support, as you probably know; Peter should be able to tell
> >us if it works with IE; about Gecko, a quick search on mozilla.org returned
> >no matches...).
> >And of course if you have to type it first into Wordpad or Word then
> >cut-and-paste, well surely Unipad is a better solution then... and
> >definitively they are not operational.
> >
> >
> >Antoine
> >
> >
>
> Here there seems to be confusion between two different issues,
> keyboarding and display. These are entirely separate issues when we
> consider browsers, except perhaps for search boxes.
>
> 1) Keyboarding: Microsoft keyboards for Urdu (and for any other language
> not supported by code pages) work only on Windows 2000/XP (and perhaps
> some versions of NT), not on 9x. Tavultesoft Keyman 5/6 Unicode
> keyboards, including the Urdu Unicode keyboard, work on 2000/XP, and
> also on 9x with a limited set of applications, including MS Word
> 97/2000/2002 with the special Wordlink add-in program (but Word 97 does
> not support RTL scripts). Tavultesoft does not support Urdu or any
> specific languages (except for Thai and Lao) itself, but provides a
> repository for keyboards produced by those who are presumed to be
> experts in the specific languages.
>
> 2) Display: In principle scripts like Urdu, whether Naskh or Nastaliq,
> display correctly on Windows 2000/XP, and also on 9x with the complex
> script display facilities installed with IE 5.5 and later. This display
> is supported in other programs, including other browsers, as long as IE
> is installed. Unicode is no problem for display with IE 5.5 and later
> even on 9x. In practice there may be some limitations in display of
> complex scripts, especially Nastaliq, on 9x because of the limitations
> of earlier versions of Uniscribe. And of course suitable fonts need to
> be installed, and do not necessarily come with the system.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter@qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
>
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