at the suggestion of behdad off the arabeyes-developers list, i’ve posted my color and arabic shaping frustrations [along with the code] on gnome’s bugzilla.
hopefully someone can point me in the right direction…
greets…
so the pango team [owen in specific] were really helpful in the past in helping fix the arabic tashkeel problem [where tashkeel on characters causes random spaces in the text]. luckily, this is fixed now. (interestingly enough, firefox for windows is broken in this respect, and, in linux, if you don’t compile with enabling pango, its broken there too… but it works on osx out of the box).
i ran into another little issue and was wondering if anyone knew how to get around this [and i emailed owen taylor in the meanwhile]. basically, the issue arises that when you insert html tags in the middle of a word, the state information of the parser is lost… as a result:
i went to houston last weekend. pretty nice, the only notable thing is that all the traffic lights are sideways. that and our flight to got delayed for such a long time because the gas truck ran out of gas [or, as we were to later discover, "broke down"]. thank God i didn’t have a connecting flight… anyways… that’s all for now.
peace. oh yeah, if you’re looking for the important [time worthy] summary of this blog post, then here it is — “this post is a total waste of time — but best of luck to my friends who are taking finals!”
anyway (for those of you who have time to waste), so one of my friends had this as an away message:
“Pyar huwa ikraar hua hai, pyar se phir kyoon darta hai dil? kehta hai dil, rasta mushkil, pyar ki hai kahaan manzil?”
being the honorary desi i am, and knowing a few urdu words, i tried to make some sense of this. pyar and dil were obvious ones that i already know. arabs will recognize mushkil as short for mushkila (problem), and manzil as home or place a person resides…
ikraar could come from taqreer, so basically as a statement or expression.
the first person i interviewed on this topic was our beloved mufti, sheikh “not-a-mufti” (those who know him, know him hehe, those who don’t, well… i’m protecting the innocent 
).
and first i asked him about the meaning of ikraar and he said, “i believe it means ‘to utter’ or to say.” — he then asked me, “context?” — and at that time, i didn’t have the full away message (because my friend had come back from away mode) — so i told him that it was gone and that i’d find out. and he said a very beautiful statement in the form of a mathematical expression:
P(away msg is mushy | contains ‘ikraar’) > .9
so anyway, i then proceeded to get the full away message. and i asked our beloved mufti for a translation and he said, “love happened and it has been said, then why is the heart scared of love? the heart says, the path is tough, where does the path of love lead to?”
trying to map it back to the original message, the only thing i was able to notice is that “phir” probably maps onto “fear,” so i guess urdu got some influence from l337 h4x0r talk too (ph34r 7h3 31337 h4x0rs!)
yeah, i just wanted to post. nothing meaningful today, maybe tomorrow. peace out everyone.