Re: kurdish sorani

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2006 - 19:57:58 CDT

  • Next message: Behnam: "Re: kurdish sorani"

    Not being an Arabic script expert, I cannot comment
    meaningfully on the details of Kurdish shaping or the
    other claims in this thread, but...

    > This is not a Persian letter issue. It's Arabic letter U+0647 issue
    > for Arabic, old Turkish, Persian.. and now perhaps Kurdish and there
    > may be more.
    > What is called two eyed initial form is only used as initial form and
    > doesn't need a control character.
    > What is produced by control character is only because Unicode doesn't
    > allow any other option but the real intended shape,

    That claim seems to me to be incorrect. The Unicode Standard
    provides information about Arabic shaping, but there is
    certainly nothing in the standard which "doesn't allow any
    other option" -- including doing the "right thing" when shaping
    for Kurdish or some other language using the Arabic script.

    The encoded presentation forms for Arabic and for Urdu are
    simply compatibility forms, and should certainly not be
    taken as constraining how one should shape the actual
    U+06XX Arabic letters in appropriate contexts. And the
    joining groups displayed in Tables 8-7 and 8-8 of the
    standard should *guide* basic Arabic implementations, but
    again should not be taken as tying anyone's hands from doing
    proper shaping for various styles or languages using the script.

    > 'abbreviated
    > form', which BTW is wrongly presented as U+0647 in Unicode PDF, is
    > never joined from the left or right.

    The glyph used in U+0647 was chosen deliberately as of Unicode 2.0,
    when production constraints no longer allowed the use of more
    than one representative glyph per character in the chart. Since Unicode 2.0,
    this choice has always been explained in the text of the
    standard. See TUS 4.0, p. 204. It is not wrongly presented -- it
    is merely *a* choice of *a* glyph for HEH, attempting to
    visually distinguish it from other related letters and U+0665
    ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT FIVE in the chart.

    --Ken



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