923890 - Support Mathematical Arabic characters

Status: NEW

(Core :: MathML, defect)

Description

[James Kitchener (:jkitch)]

Unicode 6.1 added some new characters in the 1EE00-1EEFF range to allow for mathematical transformation of Arabic characters.

At present we do not support them (verified on Try), and it appears the latest version of the STIX fonts does not support them either.


We need to implement them to support Arabic mathvariant transformations.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

What do you mean exactly by "implementing" them? I'm guessing if the user has some Arabic fonts installed, these characters could be displayed.

Comment 2

[James Kitchener (:jkitch)]

Implement was a poor choice of words.

I agree that if the user has an appropriate font which supports the 1EExx character range then it should work.  The issue is the availability of appropriate fonts.  The Windows font installer provided by Mozilla (which has the MathJax, STIX and Asana fonts) doesn't support characters in the 1EExx range.  Neither does try server (at least on Linux64).

Sourcing/installing such fonts may not be a MathML bug, but I wasn't sure of a more appropriate location.

Comment 3

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

OK, I see. It seems to me that this should not block the mathvariant bug, we can just do the mapping to the plane 1 characters and expect that people will have the appropriate Arabic fonts installed. This is true for the double-struck or fraktur latin characters too, so I don't think the Arabic one should be handled differently. One of the concern I have though, is for the very common case of single-char mi like <mi>x</mi> that currently renders correctly without math fonts but might render incorrectly if we rely on the Math Alpha Num block instead of the style=italic style. I'm not quite sure what would be the best solution, here.

@Khaled: Do you know any Arabic fonts (e.g. Amiri?) that provide support for the Arabic Math Alpha Num block? So that we can bundled them in our various installer/addon and reference them on the MDN wiki?

Comment 4

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Regarding the try servers, I was told in the past that it is possible to use Web fonts or something for the reftests. So that's probably what we want here. (I'm even not sure whether these try servers have STIX fonts install).

Comment 5

[Khaled Hosny]

(In reply to Frédéric Wang (:fredw) from comment #3)
> @Khaled: Do you know any Arabic fonts (e.g. Amiri?) that provide support for
> the Arabic Math Alpha Num block? So that we can bundled them in our various
> installer/addon and reference them on the MDN wiki?

I don’t know any fonts that have them, unfortunately. RyDArab project had some fonts, but they pre-date the actual inclusion in Unicode http://www.ucam.ac.ma/fssm/rydarab/unicode.htm.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I had mail exchanges with Azzeddine LAZREK and he said he had some versions of the fonts where the glyphs are at the appropriate code points ; he will try to find them again. However, he also said he did not want to release them under a free license or to offer the glyphs to other font designers.

I've opened https://github.com/khaledhosny/xits-math/issues/36 for the XITS fonts.