The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

Hello, I hope i'm posting in the right category.
I'm programming an app in Android for Pashto language and I came across font problem. I haven't gotten a chance to work on unicode characters in the last 5-6 years, been busy with other issues in life.

I'm looking for unicode decimal codes (isolated, initial, medial, final) for Pashto alphabets. Alphabets that are common with Arabic and Farsi have these codes in the Unicode charts but not the ones that are specific to Pashto like
ټ Arabic Teh with ring
څ Arabic Hah with three dots above
ځ Arabic Hah with hamza above
ڼ Arabic nun with ring
ګ Arabic Kaf with ring
ډ Arabic dal with ring
ړ Arabic Reh with ring
ږ Arabic Reh with one dot above and one below
ښ Arabic Seen with one dot above and one below
ۍ Arabic Yeh with tail

Alphabets that are common with Arabic and Farsi like
ی alif maskura
ي farsi ye
ې Arabic letter E
ژ Arabic Jeh
ک Arabic Keheh
چ Arabic Tcheh
پ Arabic Peh
have all the glyphs codes available. Am I looking at the wrong charts or are these codes actually missing? And how do we incorporate these glyphs in our programs?

Yeah, I'm also very interested in know if there are unicode characters for these letters. I'm working a HTML to PDF php script, but it can't connect pashto letters, since there aren't unicode chars for them.

So if anyone gets some info on this, please post here or PM me.

Thank you!

The normal design philosophy of the Unicode Standard is that the selection of precise glyph IDs is done by a layout engine and that the codes for those glyphs are not actually Unicode character codes.

When Arabic was incorporated into the first version of Unicode there was a sentiment that some older implementations would create data that used glyph codes. Solely for the purpose of handling such old data, Unicode was prevailed upon to add "compatibility" character codes for these Arabic "Presentation forms". Such old-style computer files were thought not to exist for Pashto.

Character codes for positional forms of characters are not necessary to implement Arabic or Pashto fonts. The standard method is to use a font technology like OpenType where you have tables that tell you which combination of character and position (initial, medial, final. etc.) is mapped to which glyph ID (with the glyph ID specific to the font).

When you create your own font, you would supply such tables.