Re: Arabic letters separated by markup

From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 18:56:46 CDT

  • Next message: Gregg Reynolds: "Re: Arabic letters separated by markup"

    John Hudson:
    >>> Take MS Word for example. You can make selections at the character
    >>> level and apply colour
    >> to the glyphs that represent the selected characters.

    Richard Wordingham:
    >> Which version? It doesn't work for Thai vowels in Word 2002.

    John Hudson:
    > Thai and Indic scripts are different, because selection takes place at the
    > syllable
    cluster level.

    Interesting thought. One doesn't need to select the characters and change
    the colours. There are devious means of specifying the colouring. One is
    to convert to hex (alt-x) and change the colour - the colouring is preserved
    when the hex is converted back to a character. The other is to select the
    colour, and then type the character. I have confirmed that the colours of
    the marks are different by examining the text of the RTF file.

    > This works fine for me in both Word 2002 and 2003. Not all the current
    > versions of the fonts you mention have mark attachment positioning data
    > for Arabic, though. You want to test with something like the MS Arabic
    > Typesetting font, or another advanced OT font.

    That's beyond my font repertoire, but interesting. The combining hamza that
    wouldn't combine properly displayed its own colour. While I can select the
    damma even when it doesn't disrupt shaping (it did for some fonts) and
    formally change the colour, the colour only reveals itself when I insert
    other characters, such as an 'h' before - reveals the damma colour - or
    afterwards - the inserted letter receives the assigned colour. When the
    damma didn't combine properly and disrupted shaping, it did have its own
    colour.

    All this makes it look as though PDF is the way to go. I can't say I much
    like the idea of hacking the intermediate PostScript to apply the specified
    colour. I wonder why colour selection works for you and not for me.
    Perhaps you have a more advanced Uniscribe.

    Richard.



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