Roozbeh Pournander wrote:
> You can find a proposal for encoding Iranian Rial sign in Unicode at:
> http://developer.sharif.edu/farsiweb/proposal/rial.html
I have two minor points.
First one is about the bidi category. I see that you suggest "AL" (Arabic
Letter):
Recommended Unicode character properties for the character is as
follows:
1. Character Name: ARABIC LIGATURE RIAL
2. General Category: Sc (Symbol, Currency)
4. Bidirectional Category: AL (Right-to-Left Arabic)
5. Character Decomposition Mapping: <isolated> 0631 06CC 0627 0644
But all other characters in general category "Sc" (Currency Symbol) have
bidi category "ET" (European Number Terminator), so I would suggest to
avoid this exception.
This makes sense, because currency symbols are normally associated with
numbers (they normally occur before or after an amount), and bidi category
"ET" ensures the correct behavior with numbers.
I try to anticipate two objections that you could make to this:
1) "ARABIC LIGATURE RIAL will normally be used in a RTL context".
Also U+20AA (NEW SHEQEL SIGN, the Israeli currency symbol) is used in a RTL
context, but it has bidi category "ET", not "R" (RTL Letter).
2) "ARABIC LIGATURE RIAL is decomposed by four letters of bidi
category 'AL'". Also U+20A8 (RUPEE SIGN is decomposed as the two letters
U+0052 U+0073 (i.e. "Rs"), but it has bidi category "ET", not "L" (LTR
Letter).
My other point has already been mentioned by others: the Currency Symbols
block (U+20A0...) sounds like a more appropriate area.
The objection that ARABIC LIGATURE RIAL is a discouraged character for
backward compatibility is quite weak, because this is true of many (most?)
other currency symbols in that block:
U+20A0 (EURO-CURRENCY SIGN): a mistake in Unicode 1.0, retained for
compatibility.
U+20A3 (FRENCH FRANC SIGN), U+20A4 (LIRA SIGN), U+20A7 (PESETA
SIGN), U+20AF (DRACHMA SIGN): will disappear next year with euro. Moreover,
Franc and Lira are obsolete symbols ("FF" and "Lit" are now more common).
U+20A5 (MILL SIGN): which currency is so worthy to require a special
symbol for 1/1000?
And it is also true for many currency symbols in other blocks:
U+00A4 (CURRENCY SIGN): who ever used this?
U+FE69 (SMALL DOLLAR SIGN), U+FF04 (FULLWIDTH DOLLAR SIGN), U+FFE0
(FULLWIDTH CENT SIGN), U+FFE1 (FULLWIDTH POUND SIGN), U+FFE5 (FULLWIDTH YEN
SIGN), U+FFE6;FULLWIDTH WON SIGN: just there for roundtrip conversion with
CJK charsets
On the other hand, the main common feature of characters in the Arabic
Presentation Forms blocks A and B is their being "presentation forms" (i.e.
glyphs) for Arabic contextual forms and ligatures.
It is true that there are a few full words, but their are all religious
terms in special calligraphic forms, and there was no specific block for
such things.
_ Marco
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