From: 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil)
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on Arabic aphabet news reader
Followup-To: soc.culture.lebanon
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41A   
Organization: University of Houston-Downtown
X-Lunar-Date: 6 days, 12 hours, 28 minutes since the new moon
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 01:50:00 GMT

Caveat: This discussion is getting technical: some of us might not be interested

In article <1992Oct4.203825.15772@prism.poly.edu>, medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar) writes...
>Since there seems to be a strong interest on scl for an Arabic aphabet news 
>reader let's try to organize the effort so that it does not happen in a
>haphazard fashion.
>
>First, I recall this topic came up before, cross-posted on sci.  It may
>be worthwhile to investigate where the previous effort has lead before
>we spend energy on a new effort.

Would you tell us who to call to enquire about this subject ?

I'll post something over there just in case.

>Having said that here are the issues that must be addressed:
> 
>- Will the Arabic/Persian capability be an extension of an existing news
>  reader, a completely new reader, or a stand alone (off-line so to speak) 
>  application that takes a messages file as input and produces a bunch of 
>  messages ready to be posted.

I would dream of an extension of an existing news reader such as vnews ( VMS )
or emacs ( but can it do/ made to do news ).

But your proposal of a standalone is much more realistic, I'll vote for that.

>  If we extend an existing news reader, we are thus limited to systems where
>  news readers are already developped (unix, vms, etc..)  Even then we are
>  only interested in a subset of these capable of bitmapped graphics display.

Excuse my candor, but do not those two, unix and vms, form the quasi-totality 
of the news world??  Which other system might you consider??

No graphics bitmapped display on the system itself, all you need is a terminal
emulator that does soft fonts -you mention this a little later-. From then on
you set your PC/Mac/Sun/Next terminal emulator to the right terminal and you
have your Arabic script on your own screen.

>  This effort benefits very few people and is thus limited in scope and is 
>  perhaps not worthwhile in the short run.  In the long run, it could make
>  use of a "Language: " field in the header to trigger it.

About the "Language: " field, a unique sequence embedded in the text can take 
care of the trigerring. e.g. 
                                 ~~a  for arabic
                                 ~~l  for latin 

This would give you sentences of the form

   I was talking to ~~a << Khaled >>  ~~l when we had the idea of this project.
                    ^^in arabic code  ^^back to latin script

I would compare this to the kind of codes WordPerfect, MicroSoft Word and other 
PC/Mac wordprocessors use to notify of a change of fonts -Times, Courier, 
Palatino..- or styles -italic, bold, superscript, subscript...-

The advantage is that this kind of coding is simple, and fits in 7 bits -to use
ASMO 449 (number of the Arabic standard ?)-. Another advantage is that it is
extensible to other character sets -if only to enlist the cooperation of 
qualified individuals of cultures other than Arabic, Urdu or Farsi, say Russian
or some Indian language. 

>  To build a completly new reader is even more extensive and will 
>  take even more effort.
> 
>  The best short term solution is thus to build a stand alone application that
>  takes an input file which contains several messages saved from a news reader
>  in email format and let a user process those messages and save replies in
>  individual messages.  A generic program may be written with extensions for
>  Mac, PC, X, so on.  You compile whatever extension works for you.  You then
>  have to read your news as usual, save Arabic messages for further processing,
>  start the Arabic reader, load the Arabic messages file, reply to each message
>  and save each reply in a seperate file, run your news reader, load and
>  post each message individually and voila.  Cumbersomem I agree, but it will
>  work for most people.

That is very reasonable.

>  On some systems, it may be possible to change the display fonts on the fly
>  and thus switch between the Arabic/English soft fonts with few keystrokes.
>  The problem with such a scheme is that you will really have to learn to
>  read and write backwards.

not.

Your editor/news reader will change the direction of writing as all Arabic
and Hebrew editors do: you will see the message displayed correctly, as
say an Arabic text that quotes foreign/Western sources in their native language.

>- Next issue is how you encode the Arabic alphabet in ASCII.  The options are
>  as follows:
>  . Use some coding set which bears no resemblance to Latin characters
>  . Create a one-to-one mapping between Arabic and Latin (with extensions) that
>    is somewhat readable (for example the Latin "L" is the Arabic letter "lam"
>    and with upper case or exotic characters completing the Arabic letters not 
>    found in Latin).  Double charachters here (for example the "kh" to stand
>    for arabic "kha" as in khalil) is not allowed for the obvious reason (what
>    do you do the the sequence kaf-heh?)
>  . Allow doubling one-to-two mapping with an escape character to signal a
>    double character.

In as much as possible, it is to our advantage to stick to the standards set
by ISO and ASMO -respectively the international and Arabic standards bodies-. 

These apart from being currently used by many, provide a long term vision to 
your project. At least until the 24 bits ISO standard that will include all
character sets is published.

Ibaa, are you there?  We need those sheets you started posting. Help !! 

>- Next issue is whether you include alternate forms of a message on the same
>  post.  This issue is related to the previous issue.  If we use an arbitrary
>  coding set which bears no resemblance to Latin then in fairness to those who
>  are stuck with character-mapped terminals, we need to include two forms of 
>  the message in the same post: A latin-readable form and the coded message.
>  Some keyword then marks the end of the first form (the Latin-readable form)
>  and the start of the coded form.
> 
>  A more reasonable approach is to stick with the less readable one-to-one
>  mapping and forgo with the two forms of a message in the same post.
> 
>  The one-to-two with an escape character is also possible.  It would be more
>  readable but somewhat more cumbersome to use by someone without an Arabic
>  reader.

It should be possible to have your editor generate a copy of the Arabic+Latin
message in purely Latin form using some mapping -AlephLeb maybe-.

>Of all the option I posted above, the easiest to implement is thus a stand
>alone display/reply application (which incidentally doubles as an Arabic 
>sort-of-email application) with a one-to-one somewhat readable Latinized
>coding set, or a one-to-two with an escape (quoting) character.
> 
>bassem

alex