L2/06-330

Source: Deborah Anderson
Date: Friday, October 06, 2006
To: 'suliana@ftmk.upsi.edu.my'
Subject: RE: Proposal to encode additional Jawi characters

Dear Suliana Sulaiman,
Magda Danish forwarded your email regarding encoding
additional Jawi characters. I run a project at UC Berkeley that
works with various user communities to ensure that their
characters are included in Unicode, and I also work closely with
the Unicode Technical Committee. I have reviewed your proposal
with other members of the Unicode Technical Committee. I
believe all the characters you are requesting are already in
Unicode. This is quite fortunate for Jawi, for if they were missing
and had to be proposed, you would have to wait several years to
use them.

Your tables for NYA and NGA do refer to the appropriate
Unicode codepoints to be used:
for NYA,  use U+06BD ARABIC LETTER NOON WITH THREE
DOTS ABOVE (see note appended below);
for NGA, use U+06A0 ARABIC LETTER ARABIC LETTER NIN
WITH THREE DOTS ABOVE.
The appropriate codepoint for GA should be U+0762 ARABIC
LETTER KEHEH WITH DOT ABOVE

You requested encoding contextual forms for NYA, GA, and
NGA. While it is true that the Arabic presentation block encodes
isolated, medial, initial, and final positional variants, this was only
because they had been in older legacy character sets that
encoded the presentation forms directly. The approach of
Unicode, however, is summarized under "Encoding Principles"
section of 8.2 in The Unicode Standard, "Each letter receives
only one Unicode character value in the basic Arabic block, no
matter how many different contextual appearances it may exhibit
in text" (http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch08.pdf).

Hence, it is recommended that the characters above (06BD,
06A0, 0762) be used with implementations that can perform
glyph shaping (by rendering rules), accessing the appropriate
glyphs in fonts. (The specific glyphs for the various positions
should be defined properly in the font.)

The question of Jawi is now addressed in a Frequently Asked
Question on the Unicode Consortium website, at:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/middleeast.html.

I hope this is helpful. Do let me know if you have additional
questions.

With best regards,
Deborah Anderson

* Note the comment in Chapter 8 of The Unicode Standard
(available at
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch08.pdf):
"Jawi: U+06BD ARABIC LETTER NOON WITH THREE DOTS
ABOVE is used for Jawi, which is Malay written using the Arabic
script. Malay users know the character as Jawi Nya. Contrary to
what is suggested by its Unicode character name, U+06BD
displays with three dots below the letter when it is in the initial or
medial position. This is done to avoid confusion with U+062B
ARABIC LETTER THEH, which appears in words of Arabic
origin, and which has the same base letter shapes in initial or
medial position, but with three dots above in all positions."

Deborah Anderson
Researcher, Dept. of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Proj. Leader, Script Encoding Initiative
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei
NOTE NEW Email: dwanders@sonic.net
(or dwanders@berkeley.edu)

-----Original Message-----
From: Suliana bt. Sulaiman [mailto:suliana@ftmk.upsi.edu.my]
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 1:34 AM
To: magda@unicode.org
Subject: Proposal to encode additional Jawi characters

Dear Magda Danish,

Here I attach you some file to review and hopefully Unicode
Consortium will accept it.


Regards,
Suliana Sulaiman



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