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

From: Ed Trager (ed.trager@gmail.com)
Date: Wed May 28 2008 - 10:01:04 CDT

  • Next message: Andreas Prilop: "Re: Arabic Lamalef missing Unicode Ligatures with Tashkeel and/or Shadda on Lam"

    Hi, Waleed,

    The SIL Arabic fonts can be downloaded from the following URL:

       http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ArabicFonts

    Many of the fonts on the Arabeyes site ( http://www.arabeyes.org/ )
    that Khaled mentioned are decorative fonts which may not have many
    OpenType features, so I would recommend trying the SIL Arabic fonts
    first.

    - Ed Trager

    On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@eglug.org> wrote:
    > 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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