[luatex] a bidi package for LaTeX in LuaTeX

[Yannis Haralambous]

Nice to hear from you Idris!

I can't help it but when I see verses of Arabic poetry filled with  
rectilinear tatweel to have both-side justification, it makes me think  
of a typewriter, needless to say that it is horrifying.

Modern fonts with small rectilinear tatweel are OK. But in poetry  
tatweel is often quite important, sometimes you have as much tatweel  
as letters, in that case it must be curvilinear.

The problem comes from the way Arabic script is segmentated. Breaking  
glyphs between letters is a bad choice. Take for example a medial noon  
followed by a fah. The stroke starting from the top of the medial noon  
and arriving at the highest position of the fah should be unique,  
unbreakable and perfectly drawn. When you start breaking it into  
pieces and inserting extra stuff you have lost the dynamics of Arabic  
script. It woudl be better to have either many of these strokes (with  
various widths) or a way to draw them in arbitrary widths, but always  
not-broken.

A student of Azzeddine is working on that.

Cheers

Yannis

Le 30 mars 09 à 00:23, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي  
حامد a écrit :

> On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:59:14 -0600, Yannis Haralambous <yannis.haralambous at telecom-bretagne.eu 
> > wrote:
>
>> But I believe that straight-line keshideh are very ugly.
>
> In many cases, yes. M$'s 3-level implementation is almost always  
> ugly. But carefully calibrated, with a good font and appropriately  
> chosen legal stretching points, there are places where auto-tatweel  
> is typographically appropriate, like thin columns at small type  
> sizes, or marginal notes.
>
> Even in old manuscripts you can find horizontal tatweel used in  
> poetry and the like...
>
>> One should be able to produce curvilinear ones.
>
> That is indeed the ideal.
>
> Best wishes
> Idris
>
> -- 
> Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
> International Journal of Shi`i Studies
> Department of Philosophy
> Colorado State University
> Fort Collins, CO 80523
>

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