Delason ...

Hello guys,
  My name is Nizar Habash.  I am a new member on the list. I heard through
Basilius that there were some question some of you had about Delason, and
its web page.  I will try to answer these question here:

Dynamic Fonts and the web:
I created the Delasoni script using Fontographer.  This got me the
TrueType fonts (.ttf) I used to edit the Delasoni book.  To display the
fonts on the web dynamically I converted the .ttf font to .pfr (using
Typograph from www.hexmac.com) and also to .eot (using WEFT from
www.microsoft.com/typography).  The conversion is relatively
straightforward.  The reason for the two conversions is that the first is
what Netscape expects and the second is what IE expects.  May be that's
why some of the sites you guys discussed (a Georgian magagzine?) had
problems by providing one but not the other.  I tried to look into that
site myself but I was very slow. and almost crashed my system.  I wonder
if they have any customers.  I believe WEFT is free.  The copy I have and
still use (from time to time) is version 1.0 -- current version is 3.0.
Typograph used to be for $200.00/license.  I still use version 1.0 (now
up to 2.0).  I  don't know what their current prices are.  Both tools
protect ownership and copyrights by forcing the burning of the location of
the source of the files in the files themselves:  for example, my Delasoni
font has in it the string "www.cs.umd.edu/~habash" somewhere so that if
someone took the font and tried to use it somewhere else it will fail.
One more thing,  the users viewing the pages on Netscape must make sure
they allow Dynamic font display (Edit->Preference->Fonts).

Arabic displays:
  I saw that you came across the Arabix project that I worked on in my
last year in my undergraduate degree.  Since then I have found better ways
to implement Arabic on the web: http://www.nuun.net  (even though I am
having problems separating from this company at this point --- I have to
say the products are nice)  They include editors, Arabic dynamic fonts
with special characterset and Arabic input applets (I also created two
more one in Hebrew and one in Phoenician).

Delason news:
  I haven't updated the website in a while.  There have been several
interesting events related to Dealson:  a part of a news article, three
marriages that used a Delasoni wedding certificate, all my classmates from
Old Dominion university's Honors College received Delasoni graduation
certificates the year I graduated (1997) signed by the dean o fteh
college; and finally, the ideogram for Knowledge from the Delasoni script
is now part of the official shield of the Honors college (see
http://web.odu.edu/ao/honors/) and it is engraved on all the graduation
medals they give their students.  I just had my 10,000 day birthday last
week and my friends and I had a Delasoni theme, the celebration was termed
an onedoza (or 10,000 in Delasoni).

  I have been on the mailing list for two days only and I am amazed at the
active participation ... very busy list.  Very interesting discussions
too.  My problem is like most of you I tend to get very involved in
anything relating to languages.  I am doing my PhD currently in
computational linguistics focusing on machine translation.  And in the
last two days only I have been quite distracted by teh interesting
discussions. So, I think I will take myself of the list for now and just
read the digest form.   However, if any of you have any questions for me,
please don't shy from asking.  I might be slow in responding on some days,
but I will always respond.  You can email me at habash@cs.umd.edu.

Thanks
Nizar

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