RP> But isn't it a suitable glyph encoding for Arabic?
Only to a certain extent.
With its presentation forms for Arabic, Unicode provides a fixed glyph
set for Arabic. While this glyph set is suitable for some simple
styles of Arabic typography, there is enough variation in
typographical traditions to make the use of Unicode Arabic glyphs a
short-term solution.
(While it is true that the same could be said of Latin typography, with
Latin ligatures are not used for on-screen display (or at least most
of us find their use incomfortable).)
Furthermore, I think it is a shame to go to the effort of implementing
an Arabic display engine and not make it support related scripts
(Syriac being the obvious example) which may not have encoded
presentation forms.
Folks, get over it: Unicode is not a good glyph encoding. The fact
that we're using it as such is a symptom of what is wrong with Unix
internationalisation. (``If it works for English and Japanese, it
must be international.)
Juliusz
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