From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2008 - 16:15:01 CDT
On 1-Aug-08, at 1:35 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 06:34:58PM +0200, Andreas Prilop wrote:
>> On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>>
>>>> What's the Unicode way to write Arabic "swash letter ya"
>>>> U+06D2 - but with two dots below as U+064A ?
>>>> http://www.alquds.co.uk/alquds.gif
>>>
>>> This is a mere stylistic variant of U+064A, unlike U+06D2 that has
>>> different semantics in Urdu.
>>> So, this is a mutter of using proper font, possibly an OpenType
>>> (or AAT) font with the needed glyph substitution rules.
>>
>> But U+064A (with dots) and U+06CC are also "stylistic variants".
>> Yet they have two code positions in Unicode and are thus
>> regarded as two different characters.
>
> I tend to agree with you, there are several encoded characters in the
> Arabic block that are just glyph variants; ARSI YEH, KEHEH (farsi
> kaf),
> SWASH KAF, and may be others. But I think this either was
> influenced by
> pre Unicode encodings, or misinformation at time, any how it isn't an
> excuse to added yet another stylistic variant.
There is a fine line, and often confusing, between what is stylistic
and what is the property of a language. I wish encoded text had a
standard language identifier to eliminate this discussion. But as
long as this is not the case, many characters with the same
functionality should be encoded differently in different languages. A
dotted yeh is not acceptable in Persian and most other languages of
its environment. There is more tolerance about Arabic Kaf but the
proper shape is Keheh. If they share the same code, then the language
tag standard must be in a better shape to ensure the language
specifications of characters.
Behnam
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