From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: These are GPLd arabic fonts, that would be very helpful for arabic users, and could enable RedHat to do more applications arabic capable. http://www.linux.org.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts.tar.gz Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.unpack the package above 2.copy it to .fonts directory 3.start using arabic Additional info:
Reassigning enhancement request to distribution component
Owen, opinions on the fonts?
As long as they are truely free, and not of questionable origin, and they look half decent, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't ship them.
These fonts aren't OpenType fonts so they are useless for us. (Well, worse than useless, because currently we don't gracefully handle Arabic TTF fonts that don't have the necessary tables - you get programs aborting with: ** ERROR **: file shape.c: line 74 (pango_shape): assertion failed: (glyphs->num_glyphs > 0) Though that's a bug that can be fixed) There are one or two free OpenType arabic fonts, - I was thinking of assembling ttfonts-me and ttfonts-indic packages to extend the range of the languages we cover.
We can work together to fix all the problems. I have emailed the authors of the fonts already
Turns out that the fonts do have some of the OpenType tables ... Pango is having problems because they conform to an earlier Microsoft format rather than full OpenType (no GDEF table). I probbably can make Pango work around that.
Have a fix for this in Pango CVS now.
Thanks alot Owen for the time. Please feel free to reach me for any kind of help. I am willing to give the necessary time to help. Also, what should it take in order to make the installation of Linux in Arabic possible ??
Probably only someone interested in making it happen. :) If you are interested, follow the instructions on http://i18n.redhat.com/.
KacstArabicFonts is just updated. There are now nine GPLd fonts. They look better than before. Should you have any comment, please let me know. Thanks. http://www.linux.org.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts.tar.gz
My comment: Please, please, get the upstream people to assign a version number to the the tarball. Files that change content while keeping the same name are extremely difficult to deal with when packaging.
Thanks Owen for your comment. The person in charge just assigned a version number to it. You can try it now.
Owen Mohamed Alkanhal meant you can download the newest version from this link http://www.linux.org.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts-1.1.tar.gz Regards M.Eldesoky
ooops, I forgot to include the link of the latest version in my previous post. Thanks Mohamed Eldesoki for your help. Again, the latests tarball is at http://www.linux.org.sa/download/KacstArabicFonts-1.1.tar.gz
Can we make these fonts find its way to XFree86 ?? To be available all the time with all distros ?? Searched in their site, but didn't find any contacts that I can do !!
Upgraded version in the tree to the new tarball.