>>There is a difference. Dead keys are typed "before" the base letter. >>These are typed "after" the base letter".<< Correct. A Unicode wordprocessor package in the creation of which I participated some 10 years ago called the latter variety "accent modifier keys" (which isn't very clear either). The question remains why you provide direct keyboard input for "combining" hamza & madda. Are there any letter combinations other than with alef/ya/waw that can be created via combination?
>>We want, say, modern Baluchi script as written in Iran. LoC will >>probably provide us with every Arabic letters that has ever been used in any Baluchi.<< I see your point. The best approach would probably be to ask a local publisher who publishes newspapers or magazines in these languages. But many of them may use patched fonts or simplications or other workarounds (I've seen accents added in handwriting for Pashto and even Dari!), so there is no guarantee of standard usage as well unless someone in your country eventually comes up with an "official standard" and provides workable technical solutions. As to Kurdish written in Arabic script, there may be variations due to the same reason. For example, I have seen texts where three dots are used in lieu of the "caret"-alike symbol that seems to be the one used in "standard Kurdish" (and in prestigious Kurdish dictionaries that I've consulted). My own experience comes mainly from occasional typesetting for the local Kurdish community here in C.Europe (among them, some well-known writers from Iraqi Kurdistan), but I can by no means guarantee that the Kurdish they write is identical with the Kurdish written in Iran... >>Let me give you an example. There is a certain character in Unicode, a >>Hah with two vertical dots over it, and it was mentioned as being a Pashto letter. We found that it's not used in modern Pashto at all. Unicode experts said that it comes from the librarians, so it should be used in older orthographies. [...]<< The same is true for traditional Urdu or Sindhi orthographies (e.g., letters with four dots), and I am sure you'll find the same phenomenon in many other languages (just think of Traditional Chinese versus Simplified Chinese which are now getting confused in Unicode so that the borderline can no longer be clearly drawn). In other words, whether you want these "special characters for occasional use" in a keyboard layout is a question where you draw the borderline... Best regards, Peter _______________________________________________ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb
