From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Aug 18 2009 - 17:21:21 CDT
"Mark E. Shoulson" wrote:
> See also: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/arabetics/mutamathil/ and related
> fonts by the same manufacturer. The plan here is to devise an Arabic
> font that remains legible (with only some retraining) with no shaping,
> and in this particular case with reversal to LTR ordering.
Hmmm, the designer says the opposite: "this family is mainly suitable for right to left ordering."
If the font family is effectively encoded using the existing Unicode characters for Arabic (as stated on this web
page), it remains RTL in its rendering, by design, with all existing TrueType/OpenType renderers, and you can't drop
the BiDi ordering algorithm when using it for your existing documents.
The surprizing word here is "mainly". I guess (did not try it) that it just designates the possibility of using BiDi
overrides that could be suppported by the font or the renderer if it can also mirror the shapes and/or the slanting
direction of its "italic" styles.
Otherwise, the design is a new separate script (even if it borrows its glyphs, including ligatures, from Arabic,
just excluding the contextual shapes that are all rendered identically) ; such script would have to be encoded
differently, and for now such LTR pseudo-Arabic font design would have to use either a proprietary hacked encoding
by appliying it on top of another LTR script (for pseudo-transliteration purpose, probably usable only with a
limited set of other languages already using this LTR script), or to use PUAs if there's no good match within a
well-defined subset of another existing LTR script (but with little or no usability for data interchange)
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