From: medawar@prism.poly.edu (Bassem Medawar)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.lebanon
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on Arabic aphabet news reader
Date: 5 Oct 92 04:28:58 GMT
Organization: Polytechnic University, New York

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
>

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

Dunno, I didn't keep the posted message.

>I'll post something over there just in case.

I already cross posted my original message to sci.

>>- 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.

>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.

>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.

>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.

>>  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.

>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?

>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!)


>alex

bassem