> >For example, the alleged problem of the vocalization order of > >the Masoretes might be amenable to a much less drastic > >solution. People could consider, for example, representation > >of the required sequence: > > > > <lamed, qamets, hiriq, final mem> > > > >as: > > > > <lamed, qamets, ZWJ, hiriq, final mem> > > > >and then map <qamets, ZWJ, hiriq> to the required glyph > >to get the hiriq to display to the left (and > >partly under the following final mem). > > There are a few problems with this scenario. One is that control characters > are unreliable agents in glyph-level processing. Most applications do not > paint control character glyphs, which means that they do not appear in > glyph strings so cannot used in glyph substitution lookups.
Even if the ZWJ is stripped by the application before the actual low-level paint API is called, so that instead of <lamed, qamets, ZWJ, hiriq, final mem> the renderer just sees <lamed, qamets, hiriq, final mem> you still end up with the order you need to make the distinction. The only problem would be if an application first stripped the ZWJ and then *before* calling the paint operation, proceeded to normalize the control-stripped glyph string. That would, however, strike me as being arguably non-conformant with the intent of the standard and the intent of normalization. You might end up with very strange behavior if applications started normalizing glyph strings after stripping them of format controls. --Ken
