From: medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon,soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Some thoughts on Arabic aphabet news reader
Date: 4 Oct 92 20:38:25 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.lebanon
Organization: Polytechnic University, New York

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.

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.

  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.
  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.

  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.

  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.

- 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.

- 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.


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
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon