Re: Arabic and character-cell terminals

From: Francois Yergeau (yergeau@alis.com)
Date: Mon Jun 07 1999 - 13:12:19 EDT


À 09:07 04/06/99 -0700, Frank da Cruz a écrit :
>Are there now, or have there ever been, character-cell terminals with
>Arabic keyboards and that display Arabic text on the screen?

There have been such terminals for a long time, and they are still
commercially available (including a model by Alis).

>And if so,
>how are characters placed on the screen? --
>
> 1. All the same width (monospace).

Alis' model uses monospace with some tricks added to deal with extra wide
glyphs and ligatures. For instance if the user types a U+0633 SEEN
followed by a space/comma/period, the glyph for the space/comma/period will
actually contain the tail of the SEEN (final form). The result is fairly
readable, but most important respects the 1-to-1 model expected by legacy
terminal-based software (the transparency concept).

>This question relates to Unicode in the design or selection of a Unicode
>font to be used in a multilingual terminal emulator.

We also have a terminal emulator using the same scheme.

-- 
François Yergeau



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