Re: Org-table alignment in Arabic

["Peter Neilson" <neilson@windstream.net>]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017 07:16:26 -0400, <jamdrug@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Sir/Madam,
>
> I am new to this email list about org-mode, first of all thanks to all
> contributors of org-mode. I am here seeking your help considering  
> org-table and
> Arabic text, the issue is described in this post of mine sometime ago:  
> https://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/30495/2443
>
> Look forward to your feedback. Best Regards.

I'm afraid that I cannot offer any real help, but since nobody else has  
answered yet, I'll throw out a few thoughts. Bear in mind that I do not  
speak or read Arabic, and that my knowledge of the language is restricted  
to being able to recognize three or four of the letters and to being able  
to say Salaam aleikum.

I'm afraid that the problems are inherent in the usual presentation of  
Arabic text, in which the form of each letter can vary depending upon  
context. It seems that some people are working on trying to invent better  
"monospaced" versions of the alphabet, but those all look clumsy, even to  
their inventors, and especially so to people who are already conditioned  
to see the beauty of handwritten Arabic. Your mention, elsewhere, of the  
related problem of Japanese text seems appropriate. In Japanese, the use  
of kanji, rather than kana, can be seen as more artistic and proper, and  
the use of non-standard kanji is regarded by some as "intellectual". (Some  
would say that the more esoteric Chinese characters you know, the smarter  
you appear to be.)

You thus have in front of you a problem as large as you might wish. Think  
of it as an opportunity. You can design additional Arabic fonts, and  
campaign to make them popular. You can develop extensions to emacs to  
handle whatever versions of Arabic text you wish, including the  
omnipresent need for dealing with "mixed" text where Arabic and other  
languages occur together. In particular, you can create your own  
extensions to org mode. I'm thinking that a better set of rules for  
positioning the elements of a table need to be defined. We'll help you (a  
little bit) with the lisp. The difficulties, although huge, are not  
insurmountable. Slightly more than half a century ago the idea of using  
computers to handle Arabic text in any way at all was regarded as  
ridiculously complicated. Now it's merely complicated.

You might think, "This answer does not even begin to touch the problem. It  
omits the distinction between the identity of the character and its  
presentation. It omits regional substitutions. It omits nearly  
everything." You're right. I've provided many words, and very little help.

Here's a pointer to some truly weird person's attempts to do boustrophodon  
editing via emacs:  
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/418365/boustrophedon-text-editing

Here is yet another discussion of editing Arabic text:  
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395464