Re: [h-e-w] character composition (Arabic BiDi)

[Jason Rumney]

Masood Ghayoomi <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I have installed Emacs 24 which supports bidirectional texts.
> I can type a text with Arabic script in Emacs 24 but the only problem
> which exists is that the letters are in *dis-joined / decomposed*
> forms.
> Eg: The word کتب is displayed as ک‌ت‌ب
> The libotf-dev package is properly installed.

libotf is not used on Windows.  The native equivalent is Uniscribe,
which is installed by default on every version of Windows since XP.  If
you can view Arabic properly in other applications, then your system
should have a good enough version of uniscribe, but there are downloads
available on Microsoft's support pages if you have an old buggy version
(usually this is only a concern for Tibetan, Burmese and some Indic
languages, which were not supported by Windows until later).

This may be due to the font being used - try changing the font to a
specific Arabic font, rather than one for which Arabic happens to be one
of many languages covered. And make sure you are using a modern Truetype
font, not a bitmap font or older Truetype, as only fonts with OpenType
tables will have the neccesary logic built in to join characters.

Also, try searching the archives of emacs-devel on
mail.gnu.org. Something like this has been discussed before, and I know
a solution was found between Eli Zaretskii, the reporter and Kenichi
Handa, but it may have come too late to get into 24.1, and may need some
manual configuration to get working in the released version.