-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Mike FABIAN [mailto:mfabian@suse.de] Verzonden: ma 4-7-2005 15:58 Aan: hermanmeester CC: m17n@suse.com

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For Hebrew (working in Suse Linux 9.1), I downloaded a couple of free to use fonts via http://culmus.sourceforge.net/

Is there interest to have these fonts as a package in the next SuSE Linux version?

The "freefont" package contains Hebrew, but so far that seems to be

I think those fonts could be very welcomed by anyone who has to use Hebrew. The David, Drugulin, and Frank Ruehl fonts are really needed for various kinds of texts people would want to make in Hebrew: newspaper, literary or informative texts have to be in one of those just to "look good". Compare it to Times- or Georgia-like fonts for example, we need those for certain purposes, we wouldn't want all our Latin fonts to look like Courier or "Comic Sans"-like things. the only package containing outline fonts for Hebrew in SuSE Linux. Suse 9.1 included 3 of them: Freesans (standard "sans" font, not ugly, not too attractive, Freeserif (archaic style, not for modern texts) and Freemono (pre-PC era typewriter style, if you love the stencil machine look ;-)). If the new Suse version wants to include only the most indispensable fonts for each language, I'd recommend that at least David CLM, Drugulin CLM and Frank Ruehl CLM be included. Those are what I'd almost always want to use.

At first glance, the culmus fonts appear to be quite beautiful.

I think so. As for Arabic, now we're talking anyway, I'd recommend that the Kacst-package for Arabic is no longer the only one to be included in Suse versions. That package has only one day-to-day use font (KacstBook), the rest is rather decorative. I got some nice Truetype fonts from the ArabEyes project, http://www.arabeyes.org/ and some other so-called Farsi fonts that are even better. The Farsi fonts are good because they don't get cut up in OpenOffice when they carry vowel signs. I don't know why. However, the entire Arabeyes package has too many nonsense, unreadable fonts, like "ae_Japan". Good if you want to advertise your Sushi bar in Cairo, I admit. I'd say one could include at least ae_AlHor, ae_AlMateen, ae_AlMohanad, ae_Rasheeq, for example, and the KacstQurn-font; and the Farsi fonts Nazli, Roya, and Terafik. Something else I would like to address: There is also a desire to have a Syriac layout for Linux. This, Aramaic, alphabet is almost exactly like Hebrew (same consonants). There are many who study it. Does anyone know if such a layout is there already, or if it's worked on? ((For your entertainment, only three years ago, I had to type Syriac for a Leiden institute. I typed words in MS Word in ordinary Latin. They later turned into Syriac in an external program they didn't give me. It looks rather crazy looking back. I was typing things like: whw' mn btr dqTl 'lksndrws br pylypws mqdwnyl dnpq mn 'r`' dkty:' wmHyhy wqTlh ldrq$ hlk' dpy:sy' wdmdy' w'hlk Hlpqhy lwqdh dyn 'hlk bhld' Yes, that actually means something! It's a piece of "Maccabees". For example, " 'lksndrws br pylypws mqdwnyl " means "Alexander, son of Philip, the Macedonian".)) People usually refer to Syriac fonts as "Serto" or "Estrangelo", sort of the basic cursive ("handwriting") and manuscript ("printing") alphabeths. Its looks are between Arabic and Hebrew. Actually, Arabic script is developed out of Syriac script. I found a non-Complex Text Layout Syriac font made by some scholar, but it's absurd, you have to type them backwards. The letters do have to be lined up, like Arabic. Unlike Hebrew, where all letters are separated, like western alphabeths. I'd like to do something about that myself, if it's not there yet. Would anyone be able to say where I'd find a "dummies guide" for (Complex Text Layout) font making and also glueing them together? Regards, Herman