webpositive does not render arabic fonts.

[khallebal]

it seems that webpositive has no support for the arabic language,so you might want to take a look at the bezilla source code to see how it is implemented,this will save you time trying to figure it out. i've attached 2 screenshots one with webpositive and another with bezilla showing the same site.

[khallebal]

hi guys thanks for the great job you're doing. any chance that this will get fixed soon,i'm not pushing on or anything,it's just that i want to avoid using bezilla,and this might not be so difficult to implement?

[stimut]

Is this still a problem? #6171 describes a similar problem but with cjk fonts which has already been fixed (except potentionally for some font fallback issues).

[stimut]

Replying to stimut:

Is this still a problem? #6171 describes a similar problem but with cjk fonts which has already been fixed (except potentionally for some font fallback issues).

Sorry, I should be more specific. Does this problem still occur with the proper fonts installed?

The aljazeera page still loads without text for me, but I don't know what a suitable font would be to test it with.

[khallebal]

Replying to stimut:

Replying to stimut:

Is this still a problem? #6171 describes a similar problem but with cjk fonts which has already been fixed (except potentionally for some font fallback issues).

Sorry, I should be more specific. Does this problem still occur with the proper fonts installed?

The aljazeera page still loads without text for me, but I don't know what a suitable font would be to test it with.

[khallebal]

Replying to stimut:

Replying to stimut:

Is this still a problem? #6171 describes a similar problem but with cjk fonts which has already been fixed (except potentionally for some font fallback issues).

Sorry, I should be more specific. Does this problem still occur with the proper fonts installed?

The aljazeera page still loads without text for me, but I don't know what a suitable font would be to test it with.

it's possibly a webkit issue,as i read on the net that all the webkit based browsers, from safari to chrome had sufferd from this problem in the past and got fixed by their respective devs. and it's not a font issue either,because,a)i'm using the default ones that work in Tracker and i also tested with some specific arabic fonts the problem remained unchanged,b)the font fallback problem affects arabic & hebrew chars see ticket #6967, where as web+ displays hebrew sites correctly. so hopefully this info gives you some directions as to where to look.

[leavengood]

Yeah this is related to #7053 and is indeed a WebKit problem (in our port) since Arabic is definitely complex text. The fact that BeZilla mostly works (the layout isn't perfect though) provides some hope that Haiku can at least display this text.

I think soon I'll implement a basic version of complex text layout in our WebKit port and then someday explore properly implementing it using one of the complex text layout libraries, as ​discussed on the mailing list .

That fact that you can test Arabic support is good, since you'll know better than me whether it is being displayed properly. Though I suppose displaying something, even if imperfect, is better than nothing.

I'll update this ticket when I've implementing basic support, hopefully in the next week or two.

[pulkomandy]

Hello, The basic version of complex text mentionned by ryan above is available now, and we render some Arabic characters on that page. However, I have no idea if what I get is correct.

It would be nice if you could provide a test page as an attachment to the ticket, and a reference rendering in a browser that gets it right. It's hard to compare my results against an old screenshot of a page that changes all the time. A simple page with a paragraph of text on it would do fine. Is there an equivalent to Lorem Ipsum for Arabic text? (​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum)

[khallebal]

Hello Sorry for the delay,i moved to a place where i didn't have a phone line. Now, web+ now displays some text indeed, and what's missing now is the R2L input method, and the Bindings for the Arabic scripting which is the most important part of it. On some sites web+ displays the letters in the correct order though the letters as mentioned above are De-attached and look bigger than usual, on some other sites the letters are still displayed in the Wrong order also, de-attached. I have attached screenshots for both cases and screenshots from Firefox displaying both sites Correctly. seeing that we're using a fairly recent revision of webkit and the problem is still not solved,it's safe to assume that webkit does not provide/offer a complete solution for the complex text, and maybe we shoould consider adding a backend for both web+ and Haiku,and one that comes to mind is Harffbuz which was mentioned by ryan in the list,this is the same backend used by the recent firefox, gnome ,Qt and other big projects, i think ryan was onto something there. the link to that conversation is on this ticket.

[khallebal]

On the 1rst and 3rd screenshots Firefox correct, Web+ incorrect from L2R and no bindings. On the 2nd and 4rth screenshots Firefox correct, Web+ correct order but with no bindings

[pulkomandy]

Hello, Yes, WebKit now calls Haiku text drawing functions, and these don't support layouting of Arabic text yet. We will implement that using either Harfbuzz or the ICU layout engine.

[pulkomandy]

Some interesting notes on the way this is handled on Linux (a bit out of date, but gives an idea of the involved software): ​http://behdad.org/text/