RE: ligature usage - WAS: How do we find out what assigned code points aren't normally used in text?

There are certainly monospaced fonts that support Arabic. For instance, Windows fonts Courier New and Simplified Arabic Fixed support Arabic.

Devanagari is a different matter.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org] On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 5:19 PM
To: Unicode Discussion
Subject: Re: ligature usage - WAS: How do we find out what assigned code points aren't normally used in text?

On Sun, 11 Sep 2011 23:14:04 +0200
Kent Karlsson <kent.karlsson14_at_telia.com> wrote:

> Den 2011-09-11 18:53, skrev "Peter Constable"
> <petercon_at_microsoft.com>:

> > Hence, in a monospaced font, FB01 certainly should look different
> > from <0066,
> > 0069>, regardless of whether ligature glyphs are used in either
> > 0069>case.
>
> If "monospace" is interpreted that rigidly, then it is much better
> *not* to have any glyph at all for FB01 (and other characters like
> it) in a "monospace" font.

Aesthetically you're correct, but U+FB01 and U+00E6 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS both have the ID start property, and the latter is definitely allowed in C identifiers. While U+00E6 is much securer as a character, it too tends to be quite ugly in monospaced fonts. (Courier can be quite useful for setting off text as computer code, especially variable and function names.)

Incidentally, are there working definitions of monospace for Arabic and Devanagari?

Richard.
Received on Sun Sep 11 2011 - 22:08:41 CDT