From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Tue Aug 26 2008 - 21:39:36 CDT
Andreas Prilop wrote:
> Is it okay to write the sequence
> U+0640 U+0654
> for a "joining hamzah"? Example:
> مسـٔلة
My main concern with this approach is that it makes an encoding
distinction based upon visual display that results in the same semantic
character being encoded in two different ways depending on how you want
it to appear.
I also think it may be an unreliable mechanism depending on the
rendering engine and font technology, since it presumes that U+0640 is
rendered as some kind of glyph. In some script styles and, hence, font
implementations the tatweel character is dumped during display and only
represented, if at all, by elongation of the connecting stroke that
forms part of the preceding (and/or following) glyph. This means that
there may be situations in which e.g. a word such as
مسـٔلة
may be rendered with the glyphs
مسٔلة
in which case U+0654 will be rendered above the preceding letter rather
than between the letters where it belongs if it is intended to represent
the letter otherwise encoded as U+0621.
The U+0640 'tatweel' is generally problematic, since it is an encoding
of a piece of metal rather than a semantic character. It is an artefact
of a particular technology for typesetting a particular style of Arabic
type. It shouldn't have been encoded, and I think it should be avoided.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com I should be very surprised if any of those who are daily trying to imitate hand-cut type by mechanical means would be prepared to accept, say, a frying pan with so-called hammer marks if the hammer marks came out of a mould and the pan were forced on some machine. -- Jan van Krimpen
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