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.
