Bug 24574 - Language dependent font selection of Arabic-block characters
Summary: Language dependent font selection of Arabic-block characters
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: WebKit
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Text (show other bugs)
Version: 528+ (Nightly build)
Hardware: Mac OS X 10.5
: P2 Normal
Assignee: Nobody
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on: 10874 20797
Blocks:
  Show dependency tree / graph
 
Reported: 2009-03-13 05:00 PDT by Nicholas Shanks
Modified: 2012-10-27 01:22 PDT (History)
6 users (show)

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Description Nicholas Shanks 2009-03-13 05:00:08 PDT 
The website http://urdunews.net/ uses EOT/WEFT to overcome the unification in Unicode of Naskh and Nasta'liq (akin to Han unification for CJK that we're more familiar with). It is not acceptable to present Urdu in the Naskh script used for Standard Arabic. Since many computers don't have a Nasta'liq font installed, this site tries to provide one via EOT.

Note however that
a) The OpenType font used by the site doesn't work on Mac OS X, so supporting it won't help
b) It cannot be transcoded to Unicode (bug #22339), because it already is Unicode
c) The only Nasta'liq font I know of for Mac OS 10.5 is the QuickDraw GX font Nasta'liq Navees
    i) http://scripts.sil.org/Nastaliq_Download (Warning: causes crashes on 10.4 and below)
    ii) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq_Navees (screenshot; disclaimer: I wrote that article)

The best solution would be to ship a Nasta'liq font with the OS (perhaps Apple could buy that one from SIL), and have ur (Urdu), ps (Pashto) and fa (Farsi) use that font, in the same was as CJK fonts depend on language.
Comment 1 Nicholas Shanks 2009-09-10 03:31:19 PDT 
This font now works flawlessly in Snow Leopard. In Leopard it rendered one character (ە) incorrectly.
Comment 2 Alexey Proskuryakov 2011-08-04 08:58:37 PDT 
> The best solution would be to ship a Nasta'liq font with the OS

Is there a Radar bug tracking this?
Comment 3 Nicholas Shanks 2011-08-07 09:15:31 PDT 
Not to(In reply to comment #2)
> > The best solution would be to ship a Nasta'liq font with the OS
> 
> Is there a Radar bug tracking this?

Not to my knowledge. I haven't filed one.
Comment 4 Eric Seidel (no email) 2012-10-27 01:22:20 PDT 
Is this still an issue?