[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 6626] Arabic & Farsi rendered with no shaping (all glyphs separate, unreadable!)

[bugzilla-daemon at opendarwin.org]

http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6626


ahmad.moshref at gmail.com changed:

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                 CC|                            |ahmad.moshref at gmail.com




------- Comment #4 from ahmad.moshref at gmail.com  2006-01-21 02:10 -------
(In reply to comment #3)
Neema;

This is a known problem among the Persian/Arabic OSX user ( and a moment of big
irritation too). If you would have checked IRMUG www.irmug.org you would have
been able to get rid of it for long time ago. Safari has some  problem in
dealing with bidi but this problem is rather a bug in Cocoa text engine /AAT
technology which Safari is dependent on to display the text.
What happens is that when you install MS Office it will install some fonts with
support for Arabic/Persian (the same fonts which are installed on its Windows
counter part), these fonts are: Arial, Time New Roman, Tahoma. What happen in
this case is that Arabic BBC has a tag in its HTML code which tells web
browsers which fonts to use to display its content in Persian or Arabic, Urdu
etc, one of the fonts mentioned above. 
But the problem is that text engine/AAT on OSX dose not support the fonts which
is dependent on cursive connectivity (Arabic Script) if they do not contain AAT
table. You see, OSX has problem with all TTF and OpenType fonts ONLY and ONLY
when it comes to Arabic Script. All other script like Hebrew, CJK etc are not
affected. From version 10.4, OSX translate all TTF/OT fonts into AAT for better
compatibility, to this there is an exception and guess, as usual the exception
are all Arabic script ttf/ot fonts. We in IRMUG has been reporting this since
at least two years on and on again to Fonts and International group at Apple
with no result so far. Try to write a text in TextEdit and Apply one of the
above mentioned fonts to it, you'll see the same artifact, all letters are
displayed in initial form and connectivity is gone.
The solution to this is (until Apple fix this at text engine /ATT level) to
trash these fonts which are located in /User/Library/Fonts. There are other
versions of these fonts which are located in System library, those you do not
need to bother about.

When it come to Safari the problem is that Safari would not let user to define
their own font to view the web-page content although there are such an option
in its preference you can not force it to use a defined font for a certain
script like you would do in Gecko clones (Firefox for example).

In the end I hope that Darin, David and other Apple engineer who read this
would use thier influence and contact at Apple to solve this nasty bug.

Regards
Ahmad

> Doing some experiments with Mitz Pettel and a couple others, we seem to see a
> pattern: This problem 
> happens if you have the MS Arial font installed and doesn't happen without it.
> 
> We're still not sure how to fix it, but we'll figure it out soon.
> 
> Bugs like bug 6148 will show you that some others see shaping working much
> better on most Arabic 
> pages.
> 


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