From: anoosh@wildcat.mips.com (Anoosh Hosseini)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Re: PERSIAN WORDPROCESSOR, To Be or Not to Be (part 2)
Date: 27 Aug 92 20:03:37 GMT
Reply-To: anoosh@wildcat.mips.com (Anoosh Hosseini)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: wildcat.mti.sgi.com


In article <1992Aug27.061653.15477@ringer.cs.utsa.edu>, kbahrami@lonestar.utsa.edu (Kambiz J. Bahrami) writes:
|> Howdy Folks,
|> 
|>     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?
|>

This will be good, however you need to decide what environment you are
supporting. DOS, DOS+VGA-TEXT_MODE, DOS+VGA+GRAHICS mode
etc...  Since you mentioned you are planning to plot the script, (using curves)
I assume you are in graphics mode.  We can get into the finer details later.
First let me thank you for working on this project, your efforts will force many
of the basic issues to be made public.  Unfortunately as a friend of mine put 
it, anyone who has figured out how to display arabic/Persian text thinks he/she
is a guru and wants to be Iran's next Bill Gates. :-)  So there is much 
information hiding.  It will be a good idea to put together a "technology"
directory on tehran.stanford.edu, where we can store a lot of this information.
I wrote a paper 18 months back regarding the definition of a PGUI, (Persian
Graphical User Interface. It remains unpublished, and needs a little update.
It reflects the efforts of a group of us. I will put it out at some point. 
Looking on the other side of the coin, many who have gotten into this 
interesting field would like to pursue it at a professional level. Thus 
it has to generate money to pay the rent, or following Babak's Capitalist 
dreams, it is the path to becoming "Babak Gates". So those involved at 
that level will be hesitant to release information regarding 
their advanced techniques.  All that said, any and all efforts by those
supporting shareware/public domain software will force those in the industry
to move onto more serious projects, rather that WP's selling for $300-500!


 
|> 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.
|> 
Dont worry we are all hackers. :-)

|> (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.)
|> 
|> 
No trouble, for the benefit of all, and those who have studied the
problem, the reason there are 2 codes in the ISCII table for most characters
(xxx, xxx_END) is that in Farsi/(Persian), there are words which violate the
standard rules for determining the graphical form of a character based
on its position in the text. Arabic does not have this problem.  To solve
this issue, 2 codes are used, the latter hints to the context or form
analyzer, that an "end" form of the character should be used rather than the 
connected middle form. (the context analyzer was going to pick connected
middle form based on standard rules.)  OK, so everyone understood what this
last paragraph meant :-).

 
|>    Any discussions and comments from y'all is welcomed.
|> 
|> 
|>    from the Lone Star state,
|>                                  KAMBIZ


Same here.


-anoosh
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian