RE: Arabic printing in Solaris - a2ps support for iso-8859-6 {PUBLIC} {INTERNAL}

[Senthilvelan Manickam]

Dear James,

Thanks for your response.

Please share me the iso-8859-6.edf file. I shall have a look at the below for 
having the corresponding font.

Regards,
Senthil.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Cloos [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 8:26 AM
To: address@hidden
Cc: Senthilvelan Manickam
Subject: Re: Arabic printing in Solaris - a2ps support for iso-8859-6 {PUBLIC}

>>>>> "SM" == Senthilvelan Manickam <address@hidden> writes:

SM> We are trying to print Arabic text to one of the dot matrix printers
SM> that supports Arabic from Solaris 10. ...

SM> When we print, English then it prints fine but when we print Arabic
SM> it prints junk. On investigation found out that a2ps can be called
SM> with -encoding and we don't find iso6(ISO-8859-6) as one of the
SM> supported encoding format.

Adding support for iso-8859-6 will be easy, but beyond that one requires a 
suitable font and suitable shaping.  (Looking at 8859-6,

For complex scripts like arabic, harfbuzz would be a better solution.
Harfbuzz can be found at:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz
https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz

Its hb-view program can output pdf or postscript, in addition to svg svg and 
images.

HB has the advantage that, when used with a quality font, the output will be on 
par with written Arabic, using all of the initial, medial and final forms as 
expected.  Printing 8859-6 directly would only show the isolated glyphs.

-JimC
--
James Cloos <address@hidden>         OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6

This message has been marked as INTERNAL by  Senthilvelan Manickam on 
Wednesday, December 31, 2014,8:44:53 PM.
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