Salaam Nadim, > I'd guess > unicode would favor incremental changes as opposed > to major > overhauls/shifts (just a thought).
>From my limited understanding of the issue, the changes that Tom is proposing intend to more clearly define the currently existing codepoints in the Unicode Arabic block in order to standardize the way font technologies render these codepoints. More specifically the objective is to more clearly define the contexual behaviour of the ambigious characters within the Unicode Arabic block. Today, since they are ambigious, font technologies do not have a clear standard way of rendering these characters. All in all, it seems that this is true for only a handful of characters - we are not talking about the whole Arabic block. Obviously the behavious of characters such as beh, teh are clear. However the contexual behaviour of characters such as various combinations of tanween and various sukuns and standalone hamza are not clearly defined. I think that Tom is suggesting that the contexual be more clearly defined. So there is really no major overhaul in terms of "Unicode itself". Tom is not even proposing that new characters in Unicode are necessary (except maybe one or two). Unicode's objective is pretty straightforward - to encode characters, not glyphs. Of course there has been comprimises from this ideal in the past. But I think any new proposals should try to follow this ideal. So the major overhaul is not on the Unicode side (i.e. encoding side). The major overhaul that Tom is proposing is for the font technology side of the issue. But whatever font technology is used should not impact the Unicode standard itself - Unicode should continue to encode characters as it is. So whether you use Tom's revolutionary font technology, or you use a gradually enhanced version of today's font technology should be irrelevant for the Unicode standard. Unicode concerns itself with the encoding of characters and their contexual behaviour, not the mechanisms that are used to do the actual script rendering. So basically: Unicode Font technology Unicode defines defines --> renders the --> how the result encoding encoded characters should look like Font technology takes thoses encoded characters and renders them into what the Unicode contexual behaviour definition for each character requires. I think I had a hard time explaining myself but hopefully I could communicate something. Thanks, Mete _______________________________________________ Developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer
