> Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 18:02:36 +0200 > From: Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Beesley: > > It's curious that the Arabic Presentation Forms got > > into Unicode at all, and a number of people still think > > it was a mistake, a sell-out. One of the Fathers of Unicode > > told me they were deprecated. Even the Unicode specification > > explains their presence rather apologetically. > From: Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Well, one reason that often comes up with Unicode is that they want to > have a 1:1 round-tripping from any legacy encoding to Unicode and back. > So if some existing old encoding had the Arabic presentation forms, > Unicode had to have them.
Yes, though I gather that even this principle of "1:1 round-tripping" must have been a source of conflict within the Unicode Committee. The same Father of Unicode called the implementation of Korean script (with a codepoint for each syllable) "a huge waste of code space". In the case of Arabic, the presence of the Presentation Forms, with the availability of "Unicode Fonts", is probably a hindrance to the development of proper Arabic rendering engines. People too easily get the idea that they are _supposed_ to render Arabic using the Presentation Forms, that this is the way it _should_ be done. And that's unfortunate. So even if the Presentation Forms can be defended on the grounds of backward compatibility to some (which?) old font, anybody looking forward should avoid them. Ken ********************************************************************** Kenneth R. Beesley [EMAIL PROTECTED] Xerox Research Centre Europe Tel from France: 04 76 61 50 64 6, chemin de Maupertuis Tel from Abroad: +33 4 76 61 50 64 38240 MEYLAN Fax from France: 04 76 61 50 99 France Fax from Abroad: +33 4 76 61 50 99 XRCE page: http://www.xrce.xerox.com Personal page: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/people/beesley/beesley.html **********************************************************************
