 |
|
|  |
Important:
I have decided to make a new ISO-8859-X standard that supports the Persian language better, overrides the existing Persian standards that first are implemented on MSD*S and Wind*s so are not usefull on the Amiga (Cause they are using some control codes between $80-$9F), and anyway they are not introduced to any international standard organization yet ;) Also the persian chars embeded in Arabic section of Unicode(TM), seem to be designed alittle wrong. To do this, I want my character set at least have the essential chars of ISO-8859-1 character-set. Imagine a character-set which shows all the English and Persian characters, strings, math functions and so on. I need your ideas, and which characters of ISO-8859-1 do you think are deletable while we still supporting the English language (including programming related chars, HTML related, ...).
Why I am asking this, is that the Persian characters relatively are more than many other languages, and the character shapes are differ regarding their position in the word. Some chars have only 1 shape, and some have up to 4 shapes (in official printable calligraphy, not in the artistic calligraphy! that has even more shapes), so the 96 codes available in the ISO-8859 are not enough for all of the shapes and 10 digits, and if I want to remain some of Latin-1 chars like some of currency symbols and characters like "|" (pipe) and © (copyright) as well as ® (registered trademark) then more trouble I'll face. For the Arabic language (that its chars are very alike to us, with almost the same rules) There is a standard named ISO-8859-6 but as I have seen, it only has the capital shapes of characters so it needs an engine and an special font in any computer to render the proper shape of the alphabet. I think a real standard have to include all the shapes it can show (like what English has, "ABCD" and "abcd"), so no computer may accept such a capital-only char-set so the new Persian standard can be designed as a real one ;) I can decrease the number of shapes of some of alphabet (That their shapes are similar) for the normal computer text writing, and for DTP we can make DTP packages use special engines for the several shapes for art related materials.
All of the farsi.language and iran.country libraries and any other stuff I need to complete my Persian Language Kit for Amiga are related to this standard, and my projects are stopped till I find exactly which character should be where. Ofcourse after gathering your ideas, I will try to register this char-set in ISO and so probably we will make another proud for the Amiga community and so on. Remember that this character set then can be used even for Arabic (That it's characters are a subset of Persian) and so a huge amount of arab users will be added to the Amiga community, and this will help the Amiga to grow even more! Currently, We have charcter-sets for persian that have problems. For example, the most popular Persian character-set in Iran is IranSystem, that is MSD*S based and uses the $80-$9F codes that are control codes and are not in the ISO standard, You can download an 8 point Iransystem font for Amiga or a TrueType font for the the users who can use TTF fonts by clicking here . ISO standard consists of 96 codes from $A0 to $FF.
Another standard, and say, the easiest character-set we can think about is the one designed by my friend, Ali Aarefi for his Persian Editor (PED) Program and other Persian programs he has designed. Again you can get a copy of an Amiga bitmap font in this character-set by clicking here .
All the above mentioned char-sets, including Arabic set have their own dificulties to implement. First for a better view I have to say that although Arabic and Persian languages are seems to be alike, but the rules of writing and also number of characters differ. We are talking about the char-sets, so we leave the writing rules differences. Arabic has 4 characters less than Persian, cause it is a subset of Persian alphabet. Also Arabic has a character with 6,7 shapes that only 2 of these shapes are using in Persian and other shapes are omittable, while we stay at an acceptable calligraphy. The ISO-8859-6 is only includes the capital shapes of characters, so every computer needs a Text Engine that understands the position of letter, and renders the proper shape, so it needs both an engine and a non-standard font to store all the shapes, again we will find many problems! Say different engines for different computers, problems in implementing some essential functions like Sort(), ConvToUpper() and etc. The Irana standard has other problems. It simply designed and overwrites all the standard charshapes, like Registered Trade Mark "®", Copyright "©" and afew of other symbols. What I want to design is to place all the charaters in a sorted order (not so difficult), placing the Persian number digits, and still holing important symbols in their places. I guess what chars are important, but I want to gather all the users/programmers writers and ... ideas to design the best set possible. Now what I ask you is to watch the charts, and then please Email me your ideas and ofcourse your reason to hold a char, or to omit a char and place a Persian one instead. With your ideas, You make me enable of designing a new character-set and then much computer users in the world will get happy with their computers.
Q: If you implement this standard, then how the Persian artistic calligraphy will be handled in the computers? A: Persian artistic calligraphy has many shapes for a simple character, to make a text more beauty. It is something like painting, and I think no character-set can be capable of having all of its shapes. Persian DTP packages, use their own engine and then with the help of calligrapher, make the best shape for that letter in the word. This can be done either on Amiga or any other computer. handling such a thing is the responsibility of the DTP packages, not the char-set. Q: Can Arabic be written using the new char-set? A: Yes. The traditional arabic is a subset of Persian, so it can be written using the same char-set. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 1997-2000 Paymaan Jafari Taayemeh.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
