Michael,
You'll likely find a conversion table at the Unicode.org web/ftp site.
You also need to be concerned with rendering Arabic characters into the
positional glyphs rather than having a one-to-one mapping of Arabic
characters into glyphs.
Also be aware that the mapping from 8859-6 for the digits is ambiguous for
the 10 digits. ISO/IEC 8859-6 permits the digits (0x30 to 0x39) to be
rendered with either "Latin" glyphs or "Arabic" glyphs. However,
Unicode/10646 include characters for digits in both the Latin script and the
Arabic script areas. I have heard that if the text is in the Latin half of
8859-6, digits are generally rendered with the "Latin" glyphs; but if the
text is in the Arabic half of 8859-6, digits are rendered with the "Arabic"
glyphs. Thus the mapping of digits in 8859-6 to digits in Unicode is
ambiguous. (I used the terms "Latin" and "Arabic" glyphs to reduce
confusion. I find it ironic that in the US we refer to the digits in the
Latin script as "Arabic" digits but Unicode/10646 refers to the digits in
the Arabic script as "Arabic/Indic" digits. The digits have different
shapes (glyphs) in the two scripts.)
Ed
Edwin F. Hart
Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, MD 20723-6099
+1-240-228-6926 (from Washington, DC area)
+1-443-778-6926 (from Baltimore area)
+1-240-228-1093 (fax)
edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu <mailto:edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu>
----------
From: Michael Flowers [SMTP:Michael.Flowers@digital.com]
Sent: 18 November, 1998 08:53
To: Unicode List
Subject: converters
My name is Michael Flowers, and I work for DIGITAL
Equipment, a
subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation. I attended the Unicode
conference in San Jose, CA this past September, and I was wondering
if I
could find out some information.
A project that I am working on with the US Department of
Defense, is
a dictionary lookup tool in foreign languages. The language they
have
requested first is Arabic. I was wondering if you had any
information on
converters of ISO-8859-6 Arabic text over to UTF-8 encoding? We are
using
the CYBERBIT font from Bitstream, Inc. on our NT machine.
In the future, we would like to convert other dictionaries
in other
languages over to store in our database/lookup tool, hence the need
for the
CYBERBIT font. We would like to be able to display the text from
multiple
languages on one page. Thanks in advance for any information you
can
provide.
Sincerely,
Michael Flowers
Technology Consultant
DIGITAL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:43 EDT