RE: Arabic letters separated by markup

From: Mete Kural (metek@touchtonecorp.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 11:33:33 CDT

  • Next message: Wordingham, Richard: "Re: Arabic letters separated by markup"

    >What strikes me is that the likelihood of someone wanting to colour the
    >alif portion of a lam-alif ligature is comparable to someone wanting to
    >colour the dot of an i or the cross-bar of a t. It's not exactly an
    >everyday need, I think. The fact that it is easy to provide a markup
    >representation of the former is coincidental.

    Peter, IMHO, your comparison is not fair at all. Coloring the dot of an i could obviously be more fairly compared to coloring the dot of an Arabic letter beh or a jim, etc. And probably coloring the crossbar of a t would be better compared to coloring the overstrike of an Arabic kaf :) These are not what we are talking about here. Coloring the lam or alef or lam-alef is comparable to coloring the f or i of the Latin fi ligature.

    You are right that this is not an everyday need. Nor is the need to color the f or i of a fi ligature an everyday need, but I can cite more specialty needs. These are more advanced features that I think serious rendering engine and font developers should implement. I think Microsoft should definitely implement this since most of web browsing done today still relies on Microsoft's rendering engine functinality. A quick way to implement ligature component coloring could be by doing basically the same thing you are already doing with cursor positioning within a ligature. It seems like in Microsoft Word for instance it positions the cursor halfway into the ligature when the cursor is intended to be between the two characters that compose the ligature. Basically coloring the first half of the ligature in the color designated for the first character in the ligature, and the second half of the ligature in the color designated for the second character in the ligature. Or if there are three characters, accordingly on
    e third.. Although not the absolute best solution I think this would be a next best solution (even better than coloring the whole ligature altogether which is what Microsoft does today with lam-alef).

    Regards,
    Mete 

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Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
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