At 11:38 AM 08-08-02, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>That is true, but for those ligatures as well, the compatibility
>decomposition is not actually useful in implementation. No one
>expects people to actually type out the decomposition in order to
>get the symbol as a "character". And as Michael Everson pointed out,
>the expected calligraphic form of the complete symbol is not likely
>to be supported by a standard Arabic font -- it is expected to have
>a certain defined shape, rather than simply being formed from the
>pieces of the Arabic font one happens to type it in.
For the record, there are limits in at least some font technologies on the
number of glyphs that can be mapped to a ligature in a single lookup. It is
possible to get around these limits by using contextual lookups and
'intermediary' ligation (independent glyphs -> intermediate ligatures ->
final ligature) but if gets pretty messy and one runs the risk of
accidentally triggering the intermediate ligatures where one doesn't want them.
I don't have a problem with encoding the bismillah as a character in the
sense of a unique semantic element in text. One could say that the
bismillah is more than the some of its parts.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community
as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its
unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level
indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
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