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Re: [O] Org-table alignment in Arabic


From: Peter Neilson
Subject: Re: [O] Org-table alignment in Arabic
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2017 10:44:57 -0400
User-agent: Opera Mail/12.16 (Linux)

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017 07:16:26 -0400, <address@hidden> wrote:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am new to this email list about org-mode, first of all thanks to all
contributors of org-mode. I am here seeking your help considering org-table and Arabic text, the issue is described in this post of mine sometime ago: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/30495/2443

Look forward to your feedback. Best Regards.

I'm afraid that I cannot offer any real help, but since nobody else has answered yet, I'll throw out a few thoughts. Bear in mind that I do not speak or read Arabic, and that my knowledge of the language is restricted to being able to recognize three or four of the letters and to being able to say Salaam aleikum.

I'm afraid that the problems are inherent in the usual presentation of Arabic text, in which the form of each letter can vary depending upon context. It seems that some people are working on trying to invent better "monospaced" versions of the alphabet, but those all look clumsy, even to their inventors, and especially so to people who are already conditioned to see the beauty of handwritten Arabic. Your mention, elsewhere, of the related problem of Japanese text seems appropriate. In Japanese, the use of kanji, rather than kana, can be seen as more artistic and proper, and the use of non-standard kanji is regarded by some as "intellectual". (Some would say that the more esoteric Chinese characters you know, the smarter you appear to be.)

You thus have in front of you a problem as large as you might wish. Think of it as an opportunity. You can design additional Arabic fonts, and campaign to make them popular. You can develop extensions to emacs to handle whatever versions of Arabic text you wish, including the omnipresent need for dealing with "mixed" text where Arabic and other languages occur together. In particular, you can create your own extensions to org mode. I'm thinking that a better set of rules for positioning the elements of a table need to be defined. We'll help you (a little bit) with the lisp. The difficulties, although huge, are not insurmountable. Slightly more than half a century ago the idea of using computers to handle Arabic text in any way at all was regarded as ridiculously complicated. Now it's merely complicated.

You might think, "This answer does not even begin to touch the problem. It omits the distinction between the identity of the character and its presentation. It omits regional substitutions. It omits nearly everything." You're right. I've provided many words, and very little help.

Here's a pointer to some truly weird person's attempts to do boustrophodon editing via emacs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/418365/boustrophedon-text-editing

Here is yet another discussion of editing Arabic text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395464



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