Dear Abdulhaq, > This would mean the acceptance of items 1 - 6, 9, 10, 11 and 12. If you don't > want them in the unicode standard, then they will have to be dynamically > inserted by the rendering algorithm, which as I am saying is very prone to > error.
Dynamically inserting tajweed is theoretically very well possible, but it is not part of our present discussion. To deal with tajweed as plain text, all the necessary characters _are_ already in the Uncode standard. Please note that the sample text that Metin posted to illustrate that is already encoded in Unicode, complete with typo's :-), in the following way: 1-3 "Tangweeng" was encoded by repeating the single vowel character: 1. fatha fatha 2. damma damma 3. kasra kasra. 4-6 "Tamweem" is encoded by adding 06E2 arabic small meem isolated form to the the single vowel character. The necessary miniature meem is available in Unicode as 06E2 arabic small high meem isolated form. Beware that this is a misnomer, since a single 06E2 arabic small isolated form would have sufficed (together with the corresponding 06ED arabic small low meem isolated form these characters were specifically included for dealing with this kind of tajweed; 06ED small low meem is a contextual variant of 06E2 small high meem triggered by kasra; and should therfore be ignored. The fact that nobody knows that Unicode included these small meems specifically for rendering tajweed is the real weak point here. If a standard includes "obscure" specialist characters, it should leave a trail of documentation so that later implementors like you know how to use them. Creating clear documentation and instructions should be part of our present effort. Regular tanween, the phonetically neutral nunation, is written with the inverted dammatan ligature and vertically stacked fathatan/kasratan similar to those used for MSA. A request from Unicode to change the - IMHO erroneous - practice to use a single ligature to represent final vowel redupiclation would meet with massive resistance from the industry. 9 -- 12 are redundant. They follow the erroneous precedent of encoding glyphs (which is discouraged by the Unicode Consortium): U+FD3C Arabic Ligature Alef with Fathatan Final Form U+FD3D Arabic Ligature Alef with Fathatan Isolated Form Both these ligatures is described in the standard as the contextual Presentation Form for rendering U+0627 Alif and U+064B Fathatan. The latter two characters are the real Unicodes to be used in plain text. The proposed ligatures FD40-43 would also have to be defined in terms of plain text equivalents. However, ligatures do not belong in the Unicode Standard, their inclusion was a mistake and no more ligatures will be added in the future. It is remarkable that nobody ever notices the blatant mistake in the prescribed equivalence for these ligatures as U+0627 Alif and U+064B Fathatan. This is the wrong order for encoding tanween in Classical and Qur'anic Arabic - and IMHO contemporary Arabic as well. It should have been U+064B Fathatan followed by U+0627 Alif - a TRAILING ALIF. Including typographic errors like this in an Industry Standard is the hallmark of engineers doing script encoding instead of scholars. As a general rremark I would like to point out that, due to the by definition conservative character (sic!) of Industry Standards, there is no hope in the world of getting a structurally clean solution for Qur'anic Arabic - or even for Arabic at large. The reason is, that none of the Arabic encoding patterns or font designs were researched by and for scholars and calligraphers, but by employees of engineering companies with the short term commercial objective of arabizing as cheaply and as fast as possible whatever product they had that was originally made on the assumption that Latin characters rule the world. It was from the junk yard of trashed legacy code patterns that Unicode picked its Arabic code. The only possibility to accomplish a robust solution for encoding the Qur'an - or any Classical Arabic for that matter - in the Unicode format would be designing a code set from scratch and apply for it's inclusion in the second plain as Historic or Diachronic Arabic. This is exactly what I am working on, including the conversion schemes to upgrade the Arabic industrlal rubbish in Unicode or interchange with it. t _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
