On Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:53:00 -0700, وفا خلیقی، Vafa Khalighi
I'm just curious: Did Yazdipur try to communicate with the Omega developers and offer patches etc?
I do not think so, It seems that he has got no interest in the Unicode world and he is a big fan of Knuth's TeX engine only and does not want to write codes for PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX.
Hmm, if that is true then it is not very promising...
Have you tested the bidi in luatex and compared it with that of TeX-e-Parsi? It is already much better than etex's.
Yes, I did and I still think TeX-e-Parsi's bidirectional algorithm is more powerful than LuaTeX's.
Ok, but how do you qualitatively and/or quantitatively justify that?
As I said Yazdipour has faith only in Donald Knuth and his work and no interest in other TeX engines, that is what I have heard. Donald Knuth himself congratulated him for writing the TeX-e-Parsi's engine.
Again, I think that Yazdipour's approach here is anachronistic -- with all due respect. But if this is indeed the case, then this tells me that there is no Omega code in TeX-e-Parsi at all. So in effect you are asking that luatex ditch the entire bidi model it has and replace it with TeX-e-Parsi's. Then we have to hook that in to pdf output and many other things. Given the stability and polish of the bidi engine as it stands I am not sure this is wise at the moment
1. Make an exhaustive test suite that compares bidi behavior in luatex with that of TeX-e-Parsi. You don't need to use any arabic-script, just latin modern samples;
I absolutely agree. But Let's have a test file. I write that test file with TeX-e-Parsi and you write the test file with LuaTeX and then we compare the results. If you can send a sample/test file so then I can typeset in with TeX-e-Parsi.
Hmm: You should create and run your test file -- which should contain a variety of individual torture tests -- with both luatex and TeX-e-Parsi. Compare the pdf's and identify the differences. Write a report and submit it to Hans, Taco, and me. I have attached two test files from almost exactly one year ago. You can modify these to your liking and see what happens. But I suspect you'll want to create your own tests from scratch. The apparent verbatim bug is there, on the first page of global_rl2.pdf, but other than that bidi is quite solid. Taco: Interestingly, running the file today results in a bug, but a year ago it showed up in the last two lines whereas now it only shows up in the last line on page 1.
2. Identify the diffferences between the two and determine which -- if either -- has the saner behavior for each case;
Agree. It might turns out that TeX-e-Parsi is powerful in some areas and LuaTeX in other areas. So we just can look at the powerful areas of bidirectional typesetting.
exactly. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523