Arabic font for gnu emacs

Arabic font for gnu emacs

[石田惣一]

hi. I would like to type in Arabic in GnuEmacs.
environment: emacs 23.0.60.1  Ubuntu8.04 Dell Version

This PC, Dell inspiron 12 Ubuntu, can produce Arabic fonts, but when
typing in Emacs the fonts stand individually.

Normally typing in Arabic should produce like...

أليوم

the letters are connected.  I can do it in OpenOffice or other editor,
so the computer should be fine.
But in Emacs they become...

أ ل ي و م

They are separately appeared.
How can I resolve this?

Soichi

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 26.02.2010 um 07:34 schrieb 石田惣一:

> They are separately appeared.
> How can I resolve this?


No, not yet. GNU Emacs is missing means to use particular tables of  
TrueType or OpenType fonts.

GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages. These are  
usually based on Latin scripts. And for legibility reasons the fonts  
used are mono-spaced, i.e., the characters on the (text) lines are  
lined up in fixed columns. Each character is unique and stands for  
itself, there are no initial, middle, and final forms of these  
characters.

It's possible that GNU Emacs will have, some day, features of a text  
processor. In GNOME/GTK it is already using Pango...

--
Greetings

   Pete

Encryption, n.:
	A powerful algorithmic encoding technique employed in the creation of  
computer manuals.

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[石田惣一]

Thanks for your info.  I impatiently wait until Emacs can do the job.

Soichi Ishida


2010年2月26日18:35 Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de>:
>
> Am 26.02.2010 um 07:34 schrieb 石田惣一:
>
>> They are separately appeared.
>> How can I resolve this?
>
>
> No, not yet. GNU Emacs is missing means to use particular tables of TrueType
> or OpenType fonts.
>
> GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages. These are
> usually based on Latin scripts. And for legibility reasons the fonts used
> are mono-spaced, i.e., the characters on the (text) lines are lined up in
> fixed columns. Each character is unique and stands for itself, there are no
> initial, middle, and final forms of these characters.
>
> It's possible that GNU Emacs will have, some day, features of a text
> processor. In GNOME/GTK it is already using Pango...
>
> --
> Greetings
>
>  Pete
>
> Encryption, n.:
>        A powerful algorithmic encoding technique employed in the creation of
> computer manuals.
>
>

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

Le Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:35:24 +0100, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> a  
écrit:
> GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages. These are  
> usually based on Latin scripts.
While some, like Ada, allow "foreign" language to be used for identifiers.

> And for legibility reasons the fonts used are mono-spaced
At least mono-spaced like Courier and Consolas works fine with Arabic (in  
editors which supports Unicode character properties)

-- 
No-no, this isn't an oops ...or I hope (TM) - Don't blame me... I'm just  
not lucky

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

Le Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:34:35 +0100, 石田惣一 <soujiro0725@gmail.com> a  
écrit:

> hi. I would like to type in Arabic in GnuEmacs.
> environment: emacs 23.0.60.1  Ubuntu8.04 Dell Version
>
> This PC, Dell inspiron 12 Ubuntu, can produce Arabic fonts, but when
> typing in Emacs the fonts stand individually.
>
> Normally typing in Arabic should produce like...
>
> أليوم
>
> the letters are connected.  I can do it in OpenOffice or other editor,
> so the computer should be fine.
> But in Emacs they become...
>
> أ ل ي و م
>
I've meet the same. I've searched the web for a workaround. Just found  
some hack which does not work.

-- 
No-no, this isn't an oops ...or I hope (TM) - Don't blame me... I'm just  
not lucky

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

Le Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:35:24 +0100, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> a  
écrit:
> GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages.
I forget to say : I'm not sure it's primarily indented to be used for  
programming language. A lot of people use Emacs to edit HTML document, TeX  
presentation, XML structured news papers, and so on, and me, I came to it  
with literate programming in mind, and literate programming make heavy use  
of natural language text. And what about comments in program source any  
way ? While it's true Emacs is an heavily scriptable editor, this does not  
implies its sole purpose is to be used for this, not this implies it is  
primarily to be used with Latin language (by the way, the same trouble  
comes with TeX and derivatives, which fails to properly handle non-latin  
languages).


-- 
No-no, this isn't an oops ...or I hope (TM) - Don't blame me... I'm just  
not lucky

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[石田惣一]

Guten Morgen!

Thank you for the information.  Arabtex seems what I wanted.  I will
try it right away!

Soichi


2010年2月26日23:54 Enno <ennoausberlin@mac.com>:
> Konban ha,
>
> I was asking the very same question a few months ago. There is no way to
> input Right To Left arabic in emacs.
>
> But you can give arabtex a try if its just about generating nice output
>
> Hth
> Enno
>
> The best way to predict the future is to invent it (Alan Kay)
>
> Am 26.02.2010 um 07:34 schrieb 石田惣一 <soujiro0725@gmail.com>:
>
>> hi. I would like to type in Arabic in GnuEmacs.
>> environment: emacs 23.0.60.1  Ubuntu8.04 Dell Version
>>
>> This PC, Dell inspiron 12 Ubuntu, can produce Arabic fonts, but when
>> typing in Emacs the fonts stand individually.
>>
>> Normally typing in Arabic should produce like...
>>
>> أليوم
>>
>> the letters are connected.  I can do it in OpenOffice or other editor,
>> so the computer should be fine.
>> But in Emacs they become...
>>
>> أ ل ي و م
>>
>> They are separately appeared.
>> How can I resolve this?
>>
>> Soichi
>>
>>
>

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> hi. I would like to type in Arabic in GnuEmacs.

Given the lack of bidi-support in Emacs-23, arabic is just not very well
supported, so I guess what you're seeing is that as a result noone has
tried to get arabic layout and rendering to work well (yet).
Emacs-24 will hopefully include bidi-support, at which point you shouuld
expect it to render arabic text just as beautifully as any
other program.


        Stefan

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Jason Rumney]

On Feb 26, 5:35 pm, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyba...@Web.DE> wrote:

> No, not yet. GNU Emacs is missing means to use particular tables of  
> TrueType or OpenType fonts.

Emacs 23 uses such tables already for Indic scripts, what is currently
missing is support for RTL languages.

> GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages. These are  
> usually based on Latin scripts. And for legibility reasons the fonts  
> used are mono-spaced, i.e., the characters on the (text) lines are  
> lined up in fixed columns.

Emacs has supported proportionally spaced fonts since 21.1, and non-
Latin languages since 20.1, so neither of these is the source of any
problem.

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 27.02.2010 um 05:01 schrieb Jason Rumney:

>> GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages. These are
>> usually based on Latin scripts. And for legibility reasons the fonts
>> used are mono-spaced, i.e., the characters on the (text) lines are
>> lined up in fixed columns.
>
> Emacs has supported proportionally spaced fonts since 21.1, and non-
> Latin languages since 20.1, so neither of these is the source of any
> problem.


You're right, Jason! Arabic is different from being just another  
proportional script. Many characters are not typed by the same glyphs  
in every possible place of a word. Many characters change their shape  
when used as the first (initial) character, its last (final)  
character, or somewhere in-between. So up to three glyphs represent  
one character. Text processors using TT or OT font tables are able to  
select the proper glyph (shape) of the character. It's something like  
building ligatures in Latin based scripts.

(Besides this Arabic bears more computer problems with "accents" above  
and below and writing it, for special, festive, purposes, almost  
diagonally...)

--
Greetings

   Pete

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
				– Douglas Adams

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: (Yannick Duchêne) <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>
> Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:12:06 +0100
> 
> Le Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:35:24 +0100, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de> a  
> écrit:
> > GNU Emacs is primarily an editor for programming languages.
> I forget to say : I'm not sure it's primarily indented to be used for  
> programming language. A lot of people use Emacs to edit HTML document, TeX  
> presentation, XML structured news papers, and so on, and me, I came to it  
> with literate programming in mind, and literate programming make heavy use  
> of natural language text. And what about comments in program source any  
> way ? While it's true Emacs is an heavily scriptable editor, this does not  
> implies its sole purpose is to be used for this, not this implies it is  
> primarily to be used with Latin language (by the way, the same trouble  
> comes with TeX and derivatives, which fails to properly handle non-latin  
> languages).

Don't worry.  The development of support for bidirectional editing in
Emacs has an explicit goal of supporting all the features you describe
above.  The only problem is the slow progress...

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 27.02.2010 um 01:26 schrieb 石田惣一:

> Arabtex seems what I wanted.


You can also check XeTeX/XeLaTeX and ArabXeTeX/ArabXeLaTeX. This  
variant of TeX uses Unicode encoded TrueType and OpenType fonts and  
all their special tables and uses Unicode input encoding. (ArabTeX is  
restricted to the use of 256 element fonts in some non-standard  
encoding.)

GNU Emacs has an extension, AUCTeX, to support TeX typesetting.

--
Greetings

   Pete

"What do you think of Western Civilisation?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
				– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> GNU Emacs has an extension, AUCTeX, to support TeX typesetting.

It also has built-in support for TeX typesetting, actually.


        Stefan

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[tomas]

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On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 11:36:24AM +0100, Peter Dyballa wrote:

[...]

> You're right, Jason! Arabic is different from being just another 
> proportional script. Many characters are not typed by the same glyphs in 
> every possible place of a word. Many characters change their shape when 
> used as the first (initial) character, its last (final) character, or 
> somewhere in-between [...]

Yes, but as has been mentioned in this thread, Emacs handles that
already (e.g. in Indic fonts). But alas, not in left-to-right mode.

The best we can do now is to support Eli as well as we can in his
Herculean task.

Regards
- -- tomás
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Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:30:25 +0100
> From: tomas@tuxteam.de
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, Jason Rumney <jasonrumney@gmail.com>
> 
> Yes, but as has been mentioned in this thread, Emacs handles that
> already (e.g. in Indic fonts). But alas, not in left-to-right mode.
                                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You meant right-to-left, I presume.  (Actually, pure right-to-left is
easy: just reverse everything.  The hard problem is, languages such as
Arabic need bidirectional editing, where the direction changes
dynamically depending on the surrounding characters.  Adding _that_ to
Emacs is a tough job.)

Re: Arabic font for gnu emacs

[tomas]

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On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 06:37:53PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:30:25 +0100
> > From: tomas@tuxteam.de
> > Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, Jason Rumney <jasonrumney@gmail.com>
> > 
> > Yes, but as has been mentioned in this thread, Emacs handles that
> > already (e.g. in Indic fonts). But alas, not in left-to-right mode.
>                                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> You meant right-to-left, I presume.

Oops, yes, sorry.

>                                     (Actually, pure right-to-left is
> easy: just reverse everything.  The hard problem is, languages such as
> Arabic need bidirectional editing, where the direction changes
> dynamically depending on the surrounding characters.  Adding _that_ to
> Emacs is a tough job.)

Yes, I'm aware of that. I was just sloppy.

Regards, and thanks again for your work
- -- tomás
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