[Freefont-bugs] Arabic support

[Steve White]

It appears that Arabic in FreeSans is broken as to be useless for
display of Arabic text.
The necessary replacements of initial-medial-final forms are not performed.

I tried it in oowriter and gedit.
This page shows a picture of some text with the Unicode, for those of
us who can't read Arabic:
    http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/samples/arabic.html

I thought we might have broken it somehow with the recent commits, so
I got a previous version out of CVS, built and installed it.  Same
problem.

How long has this been broken?  Did Arabic ever work in FreeSerif?

Comparing its replacement tables with other fonts that do support
Arabic, well, they're quite different.  But in FreeSerif, I see a
lookup
    'rlig' Required Ligatures in Arabic lookup 1
    'liga' Standard Ligatures in Arabic lookup 7
But the first only has 2 entries, and the second only 1!
By contrast, the ArabEyes Arab font has 4 tables, 'init' 'medi' 'fina'
and 'liga', each with many entries.

Where are the replacement tables for Arabic in FreeSerif?

FreeSerif advertizes the Arabic character range.  This should be
turned off until this issue is resolved.