Proposal for BiDi in terminal emulators

Richard Wordingham via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Thu Jan 31 16:11:09 CST 2019


On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 08:28:41 +0000
Martin J. Dürst via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > Basic Arabic shaping, at the level of a typewriter, is
> > straightforward enough to leave to a terminal emulator, as Eli has
> > suggested.  Lam-alif would be trickier - one cell or two?  
> 
> Same for other characters. A medial Beh/Teh/Theh/... (ببب) in any 
> reasonably decent rendering should take quite a bit less space than a 
> Seen or Sheen (سسس). I remember that the multilingual Emacs version 
> mostly written by Ken'ichi Handa (was it called mEmacs or nEmacs or 
> something like that?) had different widths only just for Arabic. In 
> Thunderbird, which is what I'm using here, I get hopelessly 
> stretched/squeezed glyph shapes, which definitely don't look good.

It's a long time since I last knowingly read typewritten Arabic script,
but on reading the description of Haddad's design of the Arabic
typewriter, I see what you mean.  My point is correct, but your point
is another argument for having single- and double-width characters.

Richard.



More information about the Unicode mailing list