Arabic Requirements of the BMP (was: Re: Arabic requirements)
Given that the Arabic presentation forms have raised their head,
is it worth raising the question - who _does_intend to use this part of
the Basic Multilingual Plane?
If there is nobody, this is worth knowing for the developers of
Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646.
John Clews
In message <9701100206.AA13898@Unicode.ORG> unicode@Unicode.ORG writes:
> Terry,
> >
> > | The ligatures, especially the Arabic ligatures, were encoded
> > | "for compatibility". That is a polite way of saying they were
> > | needed to meet some requirement to get the standard approved,
> > | or were needed for backwards compatibility to some existing
> > | encoding implementation which had a different model of text
> > | representation. In the case of the Arabic ligatures, the
> > | motivation was entirely for standards approval, because there
> > | was no existing implementation.
> >
> > What was the specific requirement? I think the Arabic section
> > is a mess and I can only imagine that it is the union of several
> > fonts. Is that so? what were the fonts?
>
> The requirements were *standards* requirements. They can be traced
> back to a series of JTC1/SC2/WG2 resolutions in 1992/1993 and related
> input from
> national standards bodies, comments on balloting of the standard,
> etc. No doubt this is all recoverable from the WG2 minutes and
> document archive. However, it was clearly *not* the result of some
> existing font. The fonts which were used to print 10646 had to be
> specially created for the Arabic ligatures sections, because no one
> could locate an existing font which would cover them in sufficient
> quality for the printing. The original documents requiring the
> ligatures showed them in hand-drawn form. Unicode got the Arabic
> ligatures (reluctantly, I might add) from 10646.
>
> Regards,
>
> --Ken Whistler
>
> >
> > | As the Unicode Standard clearly states, the preferred encoding
> > | of Arabic does not use the encoded Arabic ligatures from
> > | U+FB50..U+FDFF--and in fact their inclusion in the standard has
> > | only made full support of Arabic more complicated, rather than
> > | easier.
> >
> > And beyond that there are full words and a symbol for "place
> > of prayer" that I've never seen anywhere (rather like the
> > "hot springs" symbol; perhaps drawn from some guidebook?).
> >
>
-- John Clews (Character Set Development) tel: +44 (0) 1423 888 432 SESAME Computer Projects, 8 Avenue Road Harrogate, HG2 7PG, United Kingdom email: 10646er@sesame.demon.co.uk
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