Erik wrote:
>You raise good points. It was somebody else who proposed to do
the reordering and shaping required for Arabic and Hebrew in XP
code. The idea is to use Unicode's Arabic presentation forms in
the U+FXXX area for the shaping. The proposal does have its
merits, I think. Then somebody raised the issue of Thai and
Indic, and somebody else said that we should try to focus on
bidi for now.
>My concern is that we might be able to get away with using
presentation forms for Arabic for now, but then run into
problems with other languages later if we continue to try to
use Unicode as a glyph encoding. Actually, could you help me by
giving specific examples of glyphs that are *not* in Unicode?
E.g. compulsory/discretionary ligatures, shaped glyphs.
In Tom Milo's presentation on Arabic at the last 2 conferences,
he makes the point that the glyphs in the Arabic Presentation
Forms blocks are not terribly useful: there are some that are
unlikely to occur, and many ligatures that almost certainly
would occur in typical texts but aren't included.
Depending upon presentation form characters encoded in Unicode
for rendering Arabic doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:56 EDT