Arabic font "rendering" issue

[shareesm]

Hi PDF-XChange Viewer team,

I am using PDF-XChange Viewer latest edition (as of today) on Windows Vista

I noticed a bug that was reported before but not really addressed [ https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/ ... lit=arabic ] and it is really affecting my use of this product.

I'll try to re-explain the bug so maybe it can be better understood and hopefully fixed.

سلام

Take the above Arabic word [ 'salam' which means 'peace']
It is made of 4 letters:
س
ل
ا
م

[ 's'
'l'
'a'
'm' ]

Arabic is written Right-to Left and the letters are joined together based on predefined rules in the language.

So, when I put those 4 letters together, I get the above word [salam].
In windows, if I copy that word into any standard windows program (Notepad, or MS Word), it copies exactly as it should (keeping the alignment and letter-joining)

But, if I copy the above word ('salam') and paste it into PDF XChange Viewer...
1) The right-to-left alignment is removed
2) The letters become dis-jointed and not following the rules of connection


I tried this both in the Sticky-Note Tool , and the Typewriter tool

Interestingly enough, I believe that this is a DISPLAY/Font rendering issue in PDF-XCHANGE Viewer...Why?

If I past the Arabic word 'salam' into a StickyNote in PDFXChangeViewer[ I still get the 2 problems mentioned above]
then I save the PDF file and Open it an AdobeAcrobatReader... the Arabic word displays correctly!


Being in Academia, I know a lot of Arabic-English PDF document users nationally and internationally. This bug is one of the few reasons holding me back from telling everyone I know about PDF XChange Viewer

So fixing the Arabic font "rendering" issue would be much appreciated!


Let me know if you have any further questions and thanks for an otherwise great program.

[infimum]

Non European languages are ignored.
https://forum.pdf-xchange.com/ ... 24&p=23462

I don't think they have human resources to properly handle this kind of issues. This isn't good for a program that specializes in handling a text(?) format that is supposed to be universal. We may not like it, but small companies can't beat multi-national companies like Microsoft and Adobe when it comes to language issues, unless a program becomes something like Mozilla Firefox or OpenOffice where developers from all over the world are invited.

Edit: Even for a much simpler type of files whose extension is txt, I know of only one shareware text editor whose input support is as good as notepad.exe. For other editors that claim they support unicode, the truth is that they can just "show" unicode characters. They are close to being useless when it comes to inputting "exotic" languages by virtue of developing their own, allegedly superior, edit control, abandoning the excellent input support of notepad. (Yes, I used "excellent" and "notepad" in the same sentence.) For a program one of whose strong points is being able to edit pdf, this issue is really Pandora's box.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Thanks to both of you for the input here.

It's been a while so I'll see if I can get an update on where we are at the moment with regards to supporting this. We are at present planning a major version release - v3.x for the spring of 2010. Right to left support is slated to be in that release, beyond than that we'll have to see what the dev team boys come back with.

regards

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I would like OpenType features to be more widely supported in several applications, but when you start to look into it, it is a very complex issue. These are the OpenType features required for Khmer.



Then there are CJK languages, vertical scripts, right to left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew, as well as basic ligatures for Alphabetic Presentation Forms in Roman scripts. It must be a significant undertaking to support all languages properly — and how do you do test the feature if you don't even know how Arabic, Khmer or Bengali fonts are supposed to look?

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

how do you do test the feature if you don't even know how Arabic, Khmer or Bengali fonts are supposed to look?

excellent point.