From: 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil)
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on Arabic aphabet news reader
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41A   
Organization: University of Houston-Downtown
X-Lunar-Date: 7 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes since the new moon
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 15:38:00 GMT

In article <1992Oct5.042858.18418@prism.poly.edu>, medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar) writes...
>In article <4OCT199220501746@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu> 9999sc01@uhdvx3.dt.uh.edu (Alexandre Khalil) writes:
>>Caveat: This discussion is getting technical: some of us might not be interested
>>
[...]
>>>- 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 ).
> 
>vnews is a reader, emacs is an editor.  You need a news software such as CNEWS
>to run and maintain your news system.  It includes several command which allows
>you to administer news.  As far as a user is concerned, there is relaynews,
>which stores and forwards netnews articles, inews which is a "user friendly" 
>news-posting front end for relaynews, there is postnews which provides a simple
>interactive news-posting interface, and so on..  All these command can be 
>invoked from your news reader such vnews, rn, or perhaps even emacs.  I don't
>use emacs or vnews myself.

Some research is necessary here: which news reader/manager is ported on most 
systems? My limited knowledge lies in the confines of the DEC world.
I have a hunch that emacs is the package for which the most support is 
available: is there a news front end for it??

>>But your proposal of a standalone is much more realistic, I'll vote for that.
> 
>>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??
> 
>Well.. there is vm (yuk), cms (double yuk), variants of unix, and so on.. but
>I really had in mind the growing population of personal computers, be it Mac's
>or IBM PC's, PS/2, etc..  I am sure there is some news reading and posting 
>systems already developped for them that rely on network or modem.

The variants of unix are exactly that: unix. vm and cms will probably need 
more work.
It is my understanding that the Mac/PCs are not directly connected to the Net
for the quasi-totality of them.
Rather, they are just used as terminals after having been provided with the 
right terminal emulator. Some of them might have IP -Interner Protocol- numbers 
but those would only be recognizable in their local network unlike e.g.:
prism.poly.edu which will have wider acceptance.

>>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.
> 
>Well, if you have display postscript (:-)) on the high end of the spectrum,
>you can do anything, but if you're stuck with a lowly PC, then in *text mode*,
>changing the fonts on the fly means that THE WHOLE screen will change to the 
>new font and not just a couple characters in the middle of the screen.

In a *lowly* PC, this is certainly true. But if this PC is equipped with 
EGA/VGA, you can reprogram the character set. One easy solution is to arrange
the terminal emulator to place the soft font you wish to use -namely Arabic-in 
the upper ASCII 128 to 255, as in ISO 8859-6 or some other convention like 
IBM's code page for Arabic. This way, the two alphabets are available
simultaneously: Latin in the lower table and Arabic in the upper one. Of 
course, adding a third font will need more work, but we are not there yet.

By the way this upper table trick was implemented in an interesting piece of  
software called "Al Nafitha" -an-nafizha- that surfaced in Beirut about 4-5
years ago. It consisted of two pieces: 
	- a character set loader that would place the Arabic set in the upper
	table -once again, you needed EGA or better-

	-a keyboard driver that patched up the toggling between the direction of
	writing and determined the right character to display according to the
	characters preceding and following in the character buffer.

The idea was to make possible the use of Arabic irrespective of the application 
software being used. Although there were compatibility problems, it worked well
with the then current versions of WordStar, WordPerfect, dBase III+ and Lotus.

Does anyone of us still use "Al Nafitha"?

>>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
> 
>yeah.. will work on a X terminal/workstation.  Already, I get messages with
>the following content, for example:
> 
>"there is a {\em potential} of evolving"
> 
>or,
> 
>"by {\bf Monday September 21st.}"
> 
>A mailer running on graphics station can easily interpret the {\? ....}
>sequences and display them appropriately.  But, my point is that this is
>a long term goal to achieve, since not many have such hardware capability.
>
>>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...-
> 
>Yes.. what counts is the display though, and not the encoding.  WP does not
>display WYSIWYG unless you use the view option which is not editable.  MS Word,
>the non-windows version has either text mode or graphics mode.  The text mode
>does not display WYSIWYG, a change of font corresponds to a change of color
>which does not suit our purpose.

Again, the hardware is not the problem, as Khaled was mentionning: 
	- the character set can be redefined in many video modes. I'll have to 
	brush up my PC video to check for the minimum requirements.
	- worse come to worse, IBM PC mono can be used in graphics mode. 
	I have seen it done in Al-Kateb, a really old (1984 ?) editor that was
	written in Dearborne, Michigan. Primitive but it did the job. 

>>>  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.
>>
> 
>See above.. you can't mix different fonts on the same screen on an IBM PC in 
>text mode.  In graphics mode of course you can do anything, but the point
>was to avoid in the short run extensive programming.

See above.

>>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 !! 
> 
>I made them accessible publically on 128.238.10.106  borg.poly.edu, anon-ftp
>in directory /pub/coding-sets.  I agree we should stick to standrards whenever
>possible, the question is which standard is better?

Dunno.

>>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-.
> 
>(If you notice, I avoided using the dreaded word "AlephLeb" in order not
> to get knee-jerk reactions which spoil the discussion. :-) shh!)

I trust that those who initially objected have probably layed aside their 
objections when it was appearent that AlephLeb only tries to put some 
coherence in a practice, transliteration, that we all indulged in at some 
point in time. English can be so cumbersome when expressing some Lebanese/Arab
ideas. :)

>>alex
>bassem

alex
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon