At 12:18 11/18/2002, Karwan Salih wrote:
I'm about to propose two new Arabic ligature characters formed by Arabic letter LAM with small V above (uni0685) followed by Arabic letter ALEF (uni627), both in isolated and final forms. Those characters are used by Kurdish language speakers. The <http://www.kurdstan.com/Arabic.pdf>www.kurdstan.com/Arabic.pdf PDF files explains four examples of already coded Arabic ligature characters and the proposed new characters. I'm new to the Unicode world and your suggestions will be appreciated.Please note that ligatures do not need to be encoded. Arabic script ligature formation is best handled at the glyph level, using layout engines and smart font formats with glyph substitution lookups. I'm familiar with the Kurdish ligatures to which you refer, and have successfully implemented these in fonts without needing to encode the ligatures.
For an example of layout engine and smart font combination, as implemented on Windows, see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm
For sepcific information about the Windows Arabic script engine, see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/arabicot/default.htm
The existing Arabic ligatures in the Unicode Standard are present only for compatibility with a pre-existing character set. Their use is not recommended and the Unicode Technical Committee will not add new ligatures because this would break existing normalisation (composition/decomposition) implementations.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
