Re: Arabic printing in Solaris - a2ps support for iso-8859-6 {PUBLIC}

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "SM" == Senthilvelan Manickam <address@hidden> writes:

SM> We are trying to print Arabic text to one of the dot matrix printers
SM> that supports Arabic from Solaris 10. ...

SM> When we print, English then it prints fine but when we print Arabic it
SM> prints junk. On investigation found out that a2ps can be called with
SM> -encoding and we don't find iso6(ISO-8859-6) as one of the supported
SM> encoding format.

Adding support for iso-8859-6 will be easy, but beyond that one requires
a suitable font and suitable shaping.  (Looking at 8859-6, 

For complex scripts like arabic, harfbuzz would be a better solution.
Harfbuzz can be found at:

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz
https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz

Its hb-view program can output pdf or postscript, in addition to svg
svg and images.

HB has the advantage that, when used with a quality font, the output
will be on par with written Arabic, using all of the initial, medial
and final forms as expected.  Printing 8859-6 directly would only
show the isolated glyphs.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <address@hidden>         OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6