[Alpine-info] Foreign Characters?

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Sean C. Farley wrote:


> On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:

>

>> Modern Standard Arabic:

>> لمّا كان الاعتراف بالكرامة المتأصلة في جميع أعضاء الأسرة البشرية وبحقوقهم 

>> المتساوية الثابتة هو أساس الحرية والعدل والسلام في العالم.

>

> Except for this language, I am see everything else correctly.  Of course, I 

> am assuming they are correct since I cannot read them.  :)


I'd be surprised if the Hebrew displayed "correctly". It's probably 
reversed in order (look for the sequence of two glyphs at the logical 
beginning of the line:
כ 05db HEBREW LETTER KAF
ל 05dc HEBREW LETTER LAMED 
). They should appear in that order *from right to left* followed by a 
space.

Here's mlterm's rendering of the Arabic and the Hebrew on my system:
http://benizi.com/pics/mlterm-reference.png

I don't actually read Hebrew, so I'm only going by letter-ordering there, 
but the Arabic looks right. (The shaping in the second line of the 
screencap is particularly good for a terminal.)



> I have this X resource to set the font:

> XTerm*font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1

>

> Is there something else needed to view this language correctly along 

> with the others?


Like I said, I never got them all working at once. The font for the 
rendering above is:

# in mlterm config
ISO10646_UCS2_1 = -*-ae_alarabiya-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*;


Here are more renderings for reference:

rxvt-unicode work-in-progress: http://benizi.com/pics/urxvt-2-bvsm.png

gnome-terminal defaults: http://benizi.com/pics/gnome-terminal-default.png

Arabic and Hebrew are in the wrong order (LTR, rather than RTL), but the 
glyphs are correct. (modulo Arabic connections -- each individual 
character is correct, but taken together, since they're in the wrong 
order, they're not connected properly.)

rxvt-unicode does a decent job, except for the order.  gnome-terminal gets 
the diacritics wrong in the Arabic, but has a better default set of fonts 
for CJK.  Neither gets the 'shadda' correct.  (diacritic that looks 
vaguely like a curvy 'w')

Best,
Ben