From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 22 2007 - 16:39:03 CDT
===== CORRECTION =====
I couldn't be more wrong about the use of Arabic Heh in current
Kurdish practice. Inserting ZWNJ with Arabic Heh is not only to make
Heh a right only joiner, but also to make it a no-break to the left
as well. So my suggestion of using 'ae' instead of heh doesn't
improve anything. And since this is the case, using Heh dochashmee
instead of Arabic Heh for consonant heh doesn't offer much
improvement and diversifies the encoding of Kurdish heh for no
advantage.
So Arabic heh should be used with a good doze of ZWNJ.
The number of key strokes for each letter and word can be reduced in
keyboard design but the presence of ZWNJ in Kurdish text will remain
very very high.
As often is the case, the wisdom of users prevailed!
regards,
Behnam
On 18-Jul-07, at 6:46 AM, Behnam wrote:
> 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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