From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 15:46:01 EST
At 12:18 11/18/2002, Karwan Salih wrote:
>I'm about to propose two new Arabic ligature characters formed by Arabic
>letter LAM with small V above (uni0685) followed by Arabic letter ALEF
>(uni627), both in isolated and final forms. Those characters are used by
>Kurdish language speakers. The
><http://www.kurdstan.com/Arabic.pdf>www.kurdstan.com/Arabic.pdf PDF files
>explains four examples of already coded Arabic ligature characters and the
>proposed new characters. I'm new to the Unicode world and your suggestions
>will be appreciated.
Please note that ligatures do not need to be encoded. Arabic script
ligature formation is best handled at the glyph level, using layout engines
and smart font formats with glyph substitution lookups. I'm familiar with
the Kurdish ligatures to which you refer, and have successfully implemented
these in fonts without needing to encode the ligatures.
For an example of layout engine and smart font combination, as implemented
on Windows, see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm
For sepcific information about the Windows Arabic script engine, see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/arabicot/default.htm
The existing Arabic ligatures in the Unicode Standard are present only for
compatibility with a pre-existing character set. Their use is not
recommended and the Unicode Technical Committee will not add new ligatures
because this would break existing normalisation (composition/decomposition)
implementations.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
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