RE: question

Hi Richard,

Although I have limited experience using WEFT, I do have intimate knowledge
of what it is (being one of the developers behind it), so I thought I
provide some insight. 

WEFT is a tool that is used to prepare font data for IE on Windows. It does
not show text. It does not shape glyphs. It does not do anything but prepare
font data (eot files). It's the browser/os that does glyph shaping. WEFT can
not perform any tasks whatsoever at the time when a browsers shows a web
page. The WEFT application is never used directly by the browser. (The
situation is quite different with our other solutions though. People
sometime get them mixed-up).

There are no problems creating web fonts for Arabic text, as long as you use
a current version of IE on a current version of Windows. The produced font
data contains all the shaping rules that is needed to form correct Arabic,
if the tool is used correctly.

Some of the problems you can expect with non-current versions of Windows and
IE are:

Zero width characters (e.g. various diacritical marks) may be spaced
incorrectly in IE 5.0. The effect can be seen when selecting text in IE 5.5
as well. 

Win95, Win98, Win98 SE, and WinME uses a system dll (LAMA.DLL) which is not
able to handle more complex Arabic fonts/texts, for example Urdu, Sindhi,
Pashto, etc. The result is typically system crashes or hangs. 
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/arabicdev/OfficeXP/kBase/offXPwith9x.asp


Regards,
em2 Solutions
Michael Jansson

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 6:17 PM
> To: 'Russ Rolfe'; 'Salih Karadayi'
> Cc: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: RE: question
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I did this on a Windows platform - either Windows XP or 2000. 
>  Whichever
> it was it would normally have shaped arabic for me,  but as I remember
> didn't do that in the browser when using WEFT. 
> 
> Cheers,
> RI
> 
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> W3C
> 
> tel: +44 1753 480 292
> http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 
> http://www.w3.org/International/ 
> http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ 
> 
> See the W3C Internationalization FAQ page
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Russ Rolfe [mailto:rrolfe@windows.microsoft.com] 
> > Sent: 31 July 2003 18:32
> > To: ishida@w3.org; Salih Karadayi
> > Cc: www-international@w3.org
> > Subject: RE: question
> > 
> > 
> > Richard,
> > 
> > This is correct.  WEFT allows you to link fonts to your 
> > pages, but does nothing about shaping.  That is left up to 
> > the system you are on.
> > 
> > Regards, Russ 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org] 
> > Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 10:27 AM
> > To: Russ Rolfe; 'Salih Karadayi'
> > Cc: www-international@w3.org
> > Subject: RE: question
> > 
> > Last time I looked WEFT allowed you to see basic character 
> > shapes for Arabic, but didn't do the contextual shaping.  Has 
> > that changed?
> > 
> > RI
> > 
> > ============
> > Richard Ishida
> > W3C
> > 
> > tel: +44 1753 480 292
> > http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 
> > http://www.w3.org/International/ >
> http://www.w3.org/International/geo/ 
> > 
> > See the W3C Internationalization FAQ page 
> > http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: www-international-request@w3.org
> > > [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Russ Rolfe
> > > Sent: 09 July 2003 17:06
> > > To: Salih Karadayi
> > > Cc: www-international@w3.org
> > > Subject: RE: question
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Salih,
> > > 
> > > > How can I show all these languages succesfully. I don't 
> > know all iso
> > > > codes of these languages and also language codes (exm.
> > > Turkish=TR but
> > > > Urdu ???)
> > > > and standard fonts. For example can I use "Traditional 
> Arabic" in
> > > > Arabic languages. ect. Please help me immediately. Sincerely,
> > > 
> > > You may also want to look at Microsoft's Web Embedding Fonts Tool
> > > 'WEFT'.
> > > It lets Web authors create 'font objects' that are linked 
> > to their Web 
> > > pages so that when an Internet Explorer user views the 
> > pages they'll 
> > > see them displayed in the font style contained within the 
> > font object.
> > > 
> > > You find out more about WEFT at:
> > > 
> >  
> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/defaul
t.htm?fnam
e=%20&fsize=

Regards, Russ (rrolfe)
One of the World-Ready Guides (wrg)
Are you World-Ready?  http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2003 14:07:01 UTC