Creating OpenType fonts for Manday—storing contextual forms into the fonts

Hello!

As we all (should) know, the Manday (Mandaean, Mandaic) alphabet is located
in the U+0840 - U+085F codepoint range—that houses the normal (isolate
form) letters HALQA through TA, the ligatures ADU and AKEDI, and the
Arabic-derived letter AYN (besides some overstruck accents and spacing
punctuation signs of its own); another ligature—the LA-HALQA ligature—is to
be typed as a sequence of LA followed immediately by HALQA (as it
represents the corresponding Arabic ligature LAM-ʾALIF).

That process (just described) takes care of the *basic* set of the Manday
alphabet; how about assigning codepoints to their *contextual forms* (isolate,
initial, medial, and final)?! Do you put these into the Private Use Zone
Area, *or* set aside a range of *unencoded* points for them (named with
numbers having a leading underline [_] character, like the contextual forms
for Devanagari)?! What’d you all think?! The VOLT utility should be
called upon at some point...

Thank You!

Robert Lloyd Wheelock
International Symbolism Research Institute
Augusta, ME U.S.A.
Received on Thu Aug 23 2012 - 20:04:36 CDT