Re: Arabic Lamalef missing Unicode Ligatures with Tashkeel and/or Shadda on Lam

From: Andreas Prilop (andreasprilopwww@trashmail.net)
Date: Wed May 28 2008 - 04:39:07 CDT

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    On Wed, 28 May 2008, Waleed Oransa wrote:

    > I think we need to add the presentation forms for Lamalef with
    > Tashkeel on Lam to Unicode charts.

    Nothing at all should be added to the blocks of "Arabic presentation
    forms". These presentation forms were added only for compatibility
    with older software. They should not be used at all. Unicode in general
    encodes characters, not glyphs. Use only Arabic characters from
    U+0600 onwards - "regular" Arabic characters.

    When you closely inspect these presentation forms, you will find
    that also glyphs for non-Arabic languages (Pashto, Sindhi, etc.)
    are missing. But this is no problem - use Pashto, Sindhi, etc.
    letters from the "regular" Arabic block.

    _Your_ problem has nothing to do with Unicode. It is a problem
    of fonts. You can see on
     http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/temp/lam-alif.html6
    that some Arabic fonts in Windows XP/2003 do not form a lam-alif
    ligature when some non-spacing mark is between them.
    (I don't know what the situation is in Windows vista.)

    This is a problem of *fonts* - not a problem of Unicode.



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