From: kbahrami@lonestar.utsa.edu (Kambiz J. Bahrami)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: PERSIAN WORDPROCESSOR, To Be or Not to Be (part 2)
Summary: reply to e-mails, experiments, some conclusions
Date: 27 Aug 92 06:16:53 GMT
Organization: University of Texas at San Antonio

Howdy Folks,

    Hectic week for me, quite busy.  Anyway, sorry for not replying
to your e-mails.  Last week I posted my question and progress in looking
for a Persian word processor.  I got information on the two PWPs
(Persian Word Processors) on tehran.stanford, I downloaded them onto my
PC however I got an Error message with PKUNZIP telling me that the files
need to be fixed using PKZIPfix(which I do not have) so I down loaded
from tehran.stanford once more, attributing the errors to a dirty line.
however I got the same message.  I will try to down load them once more,
later on, and also get my hand on the PKZIPfix.  Trying to connect with
the ftp site that contains INTEXT was also unsuccessful.  I have no idea
what Tex is other than it is some sort of Unix(?) based Word processor,
so i dont know if it is workable for a PC, This line of though pertains
to the comment about someone having writen an arabic/persian Tex script(?).

So far I have no idea how these PWPs work.

    Now some of you have shown interest in my codes.  From what I have
read, some of you have contemplated writing some program, however the
problem is that you did not have the time/resources/knowledge...etc.
to deal with the persian character set.

    So I started thinking of instead of writing the whole PWP, how about
just write the library that other programs can use to
            1. reconfigure the keyboard
            2. display the Persian character set
            3. call routines governing character display rules
               (how a character is displayed in relation to its
				pposition on the word, etc...see note 1)
            4. access data files
               (spell checkers and thesorous(sp?))
            5. (maybe printer routines, I'll have to think about that one)
            6. other sugestions...
            ...
            a thought, should I incorporate the routines in a
            class, or would that make it too hard for non
            OO programmers?

I'm sure there are much much better programmers out there that can write
a better product than me.  I'll just provide a (standardized ?) interface
for hopefully bigger and better products.

My programs right now are mostly hard coded, and very messy.  Now I don't
want to promise anything,  but I will try to rewrite and debug the
routines by the end of september, then I'll post the .lib .h .tpu files
to a ftp site.  It might take longer if I get bogged down by  my
classes.

(Note 1: Thanks to Mr. A. Hosaini I have a set of #defines for the character
 set and keyboard.  Having a new defined character set changes many of my
 routines, since my character set was defined by quite a different
 set of criterias.  However I think I can set up the rules to be able to
 work in both environments,  I had some questions on this character set
 but I can't remember them right now, I'll e-mail them later.)


   Any discussions and comments from y'all is welcomed.


   from the Lone Star state,
                                 KAMBIZ