From: fantasai (fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 16:22:16 CDT
Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 14/06/2005 22:39, David Starner wrote:
>
> change. So, if I was writing a text about the Arabic language
> (describing the grammar, not the writing system), I might well want to
> emphasise the alifs in each of a set of words, for example to
> demonstrate the rule by which either alif, waw or yeh is used as the
> seat for hamza. And I would want this emphasis to be preserved even in
> words in which alif follows lam. Now I can't prove that there are books
> that do this, but I would be surprised if there are none.
My elementary school Farsi textbook colors individual letters in example
words as it teaches the new letters. I suspect that in teaching the
alef-lam ligature, a textbook would color the unligated form and the
ligated form as a whole. However, this is all quite irrelevant. A font
could, as explained before, provide the means to do this by not forming
a true ligature for alef-lam, but instead contextually choosing glyphs
and kerning for the alef and the lam that would form the ligated form
when put together. So, if you're writing a book that requires such
coloration, you can just use (or create) a font that has such a
capability. That doesn't remove the need to specify some reasonable
behavior for cases where the font does /not/ have such a capability.
~fantasai
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