From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 18 2007 - 05:46:54 CDT
On 18-Jul-07, at 1:23 AM, John Hudson wrote (was: Generic base
characters):
> This is something that should happen only if the user requests it,
> i.e. in the manner of spellcheckers that put red lines under what
> they think are incorrectly spelled words, or like the visual
> display of normally invisible control characters like ZWJ for
> editing purposes.
If Apple doesn't display doted circle and MS does, the situation is
revered for ZWJ. Except that Apple's own fonts don't carry the
special identifier signs for glyphs such as ZWJ and more generally,
glyphs ranging from U+200C to 200F and U+202A to 202E so they don't
show anything.
More importantly, and before addressing this issue, my question is
that are these codes reserved for rendering engines or can they be
used on the keyboard?
I know of at least two languages that use ZWNJ on the keyboard and
ZWNJ (and ZWJ to a lesser extend) are within text encoding: Persian
and Kurdish (Sorani)
It seems to me that ZWJ on the keyboard of these languages (or any
language of Arabic script) is a necessity for education and
demonstration of joining presentation forms of letters in a stand
alone manner.
But ZWNJ is more extensively used for proper displaying of the text
itself. Persian and Kurdish don't use it for the same reason, and it
is not fully justified in my view in either case. Nonetheless, having
it on the keyboard and text encoding seems to be unavoidable,
particularly for Kurdish.
The use of ZWNJ in Persian is something that could be served far
better in my view, with U+202F, a short no-break space. But ZWNJ does
serve currently as a specific spacing element.
Kurdish has an unconventional isolated/initial form for vowel letters
which are best served by special encoding, rather than special font
localization and this encoding requires ZWNJ.
Currently, the other usage of ZWNJ in Kurdish (very very extensively)
is to make Arabic heh a right only joiner character which to me, it
is unjustified and the letter 'ae' should be used instead (for vowel
heh). For consonant heh in Kurdish, heh dochashmee is more
appropriate than Arabic heh in my view.
But regardless of seemingly incoherence of these languages in
encoding rules, the usage of ZWJ and ZWNJ at keyboard level seems to
be unavoidable thus, they shouldn't display their identifying signs
within the text.
Behnam
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