Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > I have no idea how many of those work in konsole(1) - but i'm sure > none of those, except the four LAM WITH ALEF discussed here, work > with less(1), so i think support for LAM WITH ALEF provided no value > in the first place. The way it is implemented, with an ad-hoc table > inside less(1) of character combinations that form ligatures, is > just wrong and not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination, > i think. > > On top of that, how characters combine in Arabic is strongly context > dependent; even the syllable "la" forms a different ligature depending > on whether it is isolated or at the end of a longer word, and none > of the context dependencies are implemented in less(1) anyway. > > And finally, people say the situation in many Indian languages is > even more dire than in Arabic, so what our less(1) tries to do is > almost certainly completely useless for those languages, even if > we would expand the ad-hoc table. > > So, i propose to delete support for combining characters into > ligatures from our less(1): at this point, it is only used for > typing at the less prompt anyway (and not for the file displayed), > only for Arabic, and only for the single ligature "la". If we ever > want better ligature support in the future, i think we would have > to make a fresh start anyway - and i think there are many other > things to do before that.
I did less practical research than you did when I looked at this bit of code but your conclusions match mine: this is an attempt at an implementation of a tiny subset of the vastly complex problem of digital typesetting of the Arabic alef-bet. Keeping the code is probably worse than no solution at all, because (as you noted) it's the wrong implementation in the wrong place and "improving" it by adding more combination rules here would be a mistake. --Evan Silberman
