From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2006 - 19:57:58 CDT
Not being an Arabic script expert, I cannot comment
meaningfully on the details of Kurdish shaping or the
other claims in this thread, but...
> This is not a Persian letter issue. It's Arabic letter U+0647 issue
> for Arabic, old Turkish, Persian.. and now perhaps Kurdish and there
> may be more.
> What is called two eyed initial form is only used as initial form and
> doesn't need a control character.
> What is produced by control character is only because Unicode doesn't
> allow any other option but the real intended shape,
That claim seems to me to be incorrect. The Unicode Standard
provides information about Arabic shaping, but there is
certainly nothing in the standard which "doesn't allow any
other option" -- including doing the "right thing" when shaping
for Kurdish or some other language using the Arabic script.
The encoded presentation forms for Arabic and for Urdu are
simply compatibility forms, and should certainly not be
taken as constraining how one should shape the actual
U+06XX Arabic letters in appropriate contexts. And the
joining groups displayed in Tables 8-7 and 8-8 of the
standard should *guide* basic Arabic implementations, but
again should not be taken as tying anyone's hands from doing
proper shaping for various styles or languages using the script.
> 'abbreviated
> form', which BTW is wrongly presented as U+0647 in Unicode PDF, is
> never joined from the left or right.
The glyph used in U+0647 was chosen deliberately as of Unicode 2.0,
when production constraints no longer allowed the use of more
than one representative glyph per character in the chart. Since Unicode 2.0,
this choice has always been explained in the text of the
standard. See TUS 4.0, p. 204. It is not wrongly presented -- it
is merely *a* choice of *a* glyph for HEH, attempting to
visually distinguish it from other related letters and U+0665
ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT FIVE in the chart.
--Ken
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