Re: Arabic cursive in Unicode

On 21 Nov 2006, Danny wrote:

I'm trying to draw up a table of Arabic cursive characters for a text
editor: I want to take the raw data and translate into a sequence of
cursive variants.

What do you mean by "cursive characters", "cursive variants"?

An example: the letter Alef Maksura (0649) exists in an isolated and
final form at points FEEF and FEF0, but the initial and medial forms
are listed at FBE8 and FBE9 (with the complicated name ARABIC LETTER
UIGHUR KAZAKH KIRGHIZ ALEF MAKSURA INITIAL FORM). To me, this suggests
that standard Arabic includes only the first two forms, and the other
two only appear in a variant.

Never rely on the Unicode *names* for characters! They are never
changed and may be misleading. The most prominent example is the
"byte order mark" U+FEFF, which will be known forever as "zero-width
no-break space". Therefore, do not infer anything from the *name*
"alef maksura".

Second, do not rely on "compatibility characters" such as "Arabic
presentation forms". They exist mainly for compatibility with
older character sets. Never use them.

Think of your letters as follows:
U+0649 all four glyphs have no dots
U+064A all four glyphs have dots
U+06CC two glyphs have dots, two glyphs have no dots

However, most existing fonts supply only two glyphs for U+0649.
In theory, you should use U+0649 for Uighur, for example. But with
existing fonts, you need to take two glyphs from U+06CC.

.

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