I’m writing this in the hope that there are some poor souls out there who are doing the same thing and who can relate to these problems.
I am presently working at a place that develops on-line language courses for fairly exotic languages. The two languages that we are currently working on are: Dari and Pashto. The courses are being developed using Flash which supports the Arabic script haphazardly. For example, certain letters completely mess-up the order of words in a sentence. For Dari, the solution was to create an XML-based look-up table and using a couple of classes rewrite morphing characters using presentational forms. Pashto turned out to be tougher, as several glyphs didn’t have presentational forms, and only morphing forms. Our current solution was to create a custom font that mapped the missing presentational forms, and making the user install the custom font. Anyway, if anyone is facing similar problems or has better solutions and is interested in sharing their experiences please send me an e-mail to kirill at kirillmazin dot com. I can send you the AS classes that we are using to deal with these problems, and/or the custom font that we are using.
2 Comments
Hello!
First of all i will encourage you to do this job, i think we need some inovative work e.g some new glyphs are needed to be developed which are more simplified having more scientific and commercial look. I know some are already present for example Arial and Microsoft Sans Srif etc, but even thees are not enough some glyphs which have even more simplified shape and having a geometric shape which can be seen clearly in small font-size are required.
Bye.
That’s awesome! I would love to see a language tool especially for Dari. There’s really nothing out there and I wish you the best of luck.