Re: It is easy to predict the past.

From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:18:13 CDT

  • Next message: Gregg Reynolds: "Re: It is easy to predict the past."

    John Hudson wrote:
    > Chris Jacobs wrote:
    >
    >> Are there examples in arabic where a letter of the three-letter root
    >> ligatures with a letter outside the root?
    >
    >
    > The important thing to remember is that much 'ligaturing' in Arabic is
    > really a misnomer or, at best, a merely technical description of a glyph
    > processing model by which typeforms are rendered. There are many
    > different styles of written Arabic, and apart from the lam_alif ligation
    > -- and sometimes including even that -- most of the ways in which
    > letters connect to each other can by analysed not in terms of ligatures
    > but contextual adjustment of connecting lettershapes. It just so happens
    > that most typesetting technologies have handled the more complex of
    > these connections by casting precomposed combinations, i.e. ligatures.
    > But it is perfectly possible to conceive of a typesetting technology for
    > Arabic that would not employ *any* ligatures,

    Nah. The question is which "ligatures" (I prefer "compound forms") are
    required by Generally Accepted Principles of Arabic Writing. That would
    be the lam-alif only; I don't see how one could get rid of it. In some
    traditional pedagogies lam-alif was a distinct letter. All the other
    ones are stylistic variants, and they are pretty much infinite - it is
    an art form, after all.

    However, it is entirely possible to write Arabic with no "ligatures"
    (=ties binding one form to the next) at all, with a font designed for
    that purpose. But even in that case lam-alif is a single form (I
    think). It's been done for decades but hasn't caught on. Which is one
    argument against the entire notion of "conformance" definitions for
    rendering Unicode.

    -g



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:20:13 CDT