[scribus] Scribus arabic

[ale rimoldi]

salut cédric,

> I'm actually doing a Scribus workshop in Tunis and of course i have
> many questions about Scribus arabic capabilities. Well, i don't know
> what are exactly the state of the new text engine for i'm bit out the
> discussion since few months, but something surprised me very much.
> 
> I want to show how to write arabic with render frame using xelatex. It
> happened that i forgot to switch back to frame keymap and well arabic
> happened to be written quite perfectly in render frame source editor.
> 
> As a proof, i've made a screenshot of the same "hello world" from
> google translate, OOwriter, Scribus frame and scribus render frame
> editor.
> 
> How can it happen than render frame editor can support arabic
> ligatures and other specialities (kashida...) and not scribus main
> editor. How can a scribus part be more complete than the core ?
> 
> Is there something that cna be or worth to be done here ?

afaict, the text field in the render frame editor (as well as the ones
in the story editor) are directly managed by Qt.

so, all languages and features supported by Qt are accessible there.
this seems to include arabic scripts... but, probably, not advanced
typographic rules (kerning and so on...).

that's why the scribus "main workspace" has to reimplement all the
glyph handling and can't rely on what Qt can do itself.

but: who knows? maybe nowadays Qt would simple be good enough?

ciao
a.l.e