Re: Arabic Lamalef missing Unicode Ligatures with Tashkeel and/or Shadda on Lam

From: Khaled Hosny (khaledhosny@eglug.org)
Date: Wed May 28 2008 - 06:51:11 CDT

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    On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:52:41AM +0300, Waleed Oransa wrote:
    >
    > Hello all,
    >
    > I would like to discuss one of the current problems Arabic people are facing
    > regarding proper Arabic presentation using Unicode. Currently Unicode Arabic
    > presentation Forms-A/B does not contain the proper ligature for LamAlef with
    > Tashkeel and/or Shadda on Lam. While this is allowed in Arabic and exits in
    > Qura'an, this lack of support cause a wrong presentation for Lamalef with
    > Tashkeel that use a normal shaping for Lam and Alef instead of using the
    > ligature Lamalef with Tashkeel/Shadda on Lam. I think we need to add the
    > presentation forms for Lamalef with Tashkeel on Lam to Unicode charts. This
    > will need addressing different Lamalef plus different Tashkeel (at Fatha,
    > Damma, Kasra, Sukun) and Shadda as well. This will need up to 64 new Lamalef
    > ligatures.

    This is a font problem, I think some Arabic fonts from Microsoft doesn't
    handle tashkil on ligatures correctly, leading to the situation you
    described. You can try SIL or Arabeyes Arabic fonts as it doesn't suffer
    from this. Moreover such situations should be addressed at font level
    using smart font technologies like OpenType or AAT. Arabic Presentation
    forms exist only for compatibility with legacy Arabic encodings and,
    being significantly inefficient, should be avoided in modern systems.

     Khaled





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