From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Aug 18 2009 - 17:40:31 CDT
"Christoph Päper" wrote:
> Roozbeh Pournader:
> > On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 10:51 +0100, Julian Bradfield wrote:
> >> Is it really the case that Arabic and Hindi speakers *can't read*
> >> unshaped script?
> >
> > Yes. Most of them can't. Disjoint Arabic script is very hard to
> > read by the average person (...). It's *not* comparable to, say,
> > reading Latin in ALL CAPS.
>
> I won’t disagree that people who have Arabic as a first script are
> not used to and would rather not read it segmentally[1], but I don’t
> believe they’re unable to read it. Do you know studies to back up
> this claim or is it just your experience?
It may be useful for people that are trained to alphabetic scripts and have difficulties when learning now the
arabic script. It could be used to learn the Arabic language, in order to be later able to read the Coran in its
original text, possibly along with an alphabetic or phonetic transliteration.
It could also help Arabic text correctors (after specific training) for fast discovery of orthographic errors and
ease of correction (text selection on screen with a mouse or with just the cursor keypads is a nightmare with
traditional rendering).
It would be very convenient to have such LTR rendering of Arabic for HTML/XML editing for example, if the editor's
renderer can be instructed to disable the BiDi reordering. But the actual document would be rendered in browsers
with more traditional RTL fonts and with BiDi enabled. When used as such a technical tool, it would probably need to
feature also a 'visible controls' mode for showing explicitly the position of zero-width disjoiners and BiDi-
overrides.
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