Those "snakes" do exist in Arabic for justification purpose (they are
formatting controls insertable between pairs of joined letters and possibly
used as base holders for diacritics).
Otherwise they are just normal "filler" (punctuation-like symbols like
leader dots, otherwise "crap text").
The Arabic tatweel is very smart (better than extending the only spacing
that applies only between words and better than breaking words with
interletter spacing or changing the shape of letters, or packing letters to
remove their normal spacing gap and creating collisions).
Technically such "tatweel" also exist in Latin with its cursive form (with
joined letters), and possibly as well in cursive forms of Greek and
Cyrillic. But they are still not encoded at all (as formatting controls),
even if they could also be used as base holders for some left-side or
right-side diacritics.
2016-05-04 9:07 GMT+02:00 Mark Davis ☕️ <mark_at_macchiato.com>:
> Very nice!
>
> Mark
>
> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:54 AM, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode_at_inf.ed.ac.uk
> > wrote:
>
>> See
>> http://xkcd.com/1676/
>> (making sure to look at the mouse-over text)
>>
>> --
>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
>> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>>
>>
>
Received on Wed May 04 2016 - 06:22:11 CDT
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