Non latin fonts - arabic and mongolian script

[ojutan]

hi I noticed a strange thing.
Since Windows 7 there are several unicode codepages in Arial (a Windows 7 system script) it is possible to enter language with scripted letters / forms.

That is something where you type a character and that determines how the next character will look alile.
Even latin letters might have these scripted rules - every character has at least 4 forms:
- single character
- first character of a word
- in the middle of the word (here special rules apply encoded into the font)
- at the end.
When I tried this I saw that Audiolabel treats every character as single character, so the middle-of-the-word or end-of-the-word rule never applies. The result is script that consists only out of single characters, not linked.

Other tools, even notepad or the textbox of MSpaint.exe (both parts from Windows 7) do the job correctly, show the correct words. I think that many languages like Hebrew or Gerorgian will show up in Audiolabel in the wrong way as well - but Mongolian is just simple left-to-right script and that show up wrong.

Versions:
Audiolabel Version 6 build 5
Windows 7 SP1 64 bit ultimate

I used the standard IME in Windows for Chinese PR China, having the mongol script activated as additional input method. This is standard in Windows 7 becasue there is no mongolian script in the mongolian keyboard.

[ojutan]

just one note - in Windows 7 there is no script version of latin letters included, at least not in Arial. But arabic is present, and there is ONLY handscript-style arabic, same as Mongolian which has the advantage that it written from left to the right.

Hi,

Thank you for the detailed description. I'll see if our developers can fix this problem. For testing purposes, it would be very helpful to have some Mongolian script words that we could put into AudioLabel.

Could you please reply to this post, and copy and paste in some actual Mongolian script words? (not images, but text ᠬᠪᠪᠷ )

I'm using Internet Explorer 11, and the Mongolian script looks good when you "Zoom In". It seems like Google Chrome has problems displaying Mongolian script.

[ojutan]

ok here is the sample text:

ᠬᠤᠭᠤᠷ

even copy and paste from Notepad gives me the "corrupted" result.
Also printing this will give wrong characters, it's not only the preview.

p.s. I was used to develop software for about 10 years..... I know from the perspective of a developer what is needed for fixing some bugs.

Hi,

Thanks for the test Mongolian word. I talked to our developers about this issue, and they said the current text engine in AudioLabel does not have the correct kerning information (or letter spacing) for Mongolian. There is a newer text engine called DirectWrite from Microsoft with can handle all language characters correctly (for Windows Vista and above). I was told the new DirectWrite text engine was not an easy change, and would require a fair amount of development time. The DirectWrite text engine will most likely be added to AudioLabel in about a year (with the release of AudioLabel Version 7.0)