At 19:14 5/12/2002, Amir Herman wrote:
>I would strongly suggest that instead of correcting the U+6AC, we add
>another glyph of 'GA' of letter 'KEHEH' (U+6A9) with dot above. It is not
>100% wrong of saying
>that existing U+6AC represent 'GA' for old malay. Only that the glyph is
>in 'rare' shape and seldom being used in normal writing. The major problem
>for this glyph is it
>can't represent the character when we want to use it as a first and middle
>position of a word. With the existing 'GA' of U+6AC, we can only use it
>when 'GA' come as
>the last character of a word. The same case actually goes for 'KAF' in
>arabic. Although for Unicode it refers to U+643 as 'KAF' but in writing
>this glyph is seldom being
>used due of its limitation of 'shaping transformation'. Same as the case
>of U+6AC, the U+643 cannot represent the 'KAF' when it located at the
>first or middle of a
>word. Thats why in Arabic writings including Qur'an itself the letter
>'KAF' mostly represent by U+6A9.
>
>As conclusion, I would say that we can still preserve the existing U+6AC
>because it is not wrong, only the glyph is not standard and limited in its
>use. Later on I might
>send some images to clarify my argument. The task now is to add another
>glyph that could present the standard and most common glyph of 'GA'.
Amir, you are misunderstanding the nature of Unicode. Unicode is a
*character* encoding standard, and the glyphs in the charts are intended
only as a visual guide suggesting normative shapes for those characters. In
the case of Arabic, a single character codepoint is assigned to each
letter, regardless of the shaping required for that letter. In the Unicode
charts, Arabic characters are typically represented by glyphs showing their
isolated form, unless it is another form that is distinctive (e.g. the Urdu
heh goal). It is the purpose of higher level glyph shaping software --
usually a combination of script shaping engine (e.g. MS Uniscribe) and
intelligent font format (e.g. OpenType) -- to represent this character with
glyphs appropriate to the position in a word and responsive to other
factors affecting shaping. For more information, you might read my article
'Windows Glyph Processing' at
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm.
The only problem with U+06AC as it is currently represented in the Unicode
charts is that the glyph is a poor and misleading visual guide because it
does not represent the more common form of this letter in Jawi.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
If meaning is inherently public and rule-governed, then the
fact that I can't read 'Treasure Island' without visualising
Long John Silver as a one-legged version of my grandmother
is of interest only to my psychotherapist and myself.
Terry Eagleton
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