Dear Thomas On Sunday 13 June 2004 13:27, Thomas Milo wrote: > The use of repeated damma/fatha/kasra is just an example of how it could > be done. For modern font technology internal glyph substition is a trivial > matter. Internally two Unicodes can be made a single glyph (=ligature) or > one Unicode can make many glyphs (for instance multiple pen strokes to > build one letter).
Please bear with me and follow it through on the technological/rendering side. What current font _standard_ never mind implementation will take two dammas and accent the base glyph by offsetting the second identical accent automatically from the first? I am not a font expert so please be patient with me, but do the current definitions of glyph substitution allow for two identical subsequent accents to be overlaid on the base glyph in a offset way? How can Mac OS X be expected to take a font of whatever modern standard and to know that the second glyph in a damma/damma sequence is not simply overlaid the first, but offset, and how will it know how much to offset it? I know that there are multiple marks available on a base glyph but I'm not familiar with the intricate details of how the various accent glyphs are located onto the correct mark. A method I can think of off the top of my head is that a new code such as 'damma offset' or 'ikhfaa' is introduced which could be added as a second accent character in the text stream. I think you can guess that I don't like it much :-) >This is in fact exactly how I analyse Arabic script and why I consider the >existing legacy code industrial trash. However, in our present discussion we >are looking for ways to make the best of the existing Arabic block in >Unicode. I agree that this is how script is best rendered, but I am very surprised if you mean that text should be coded like this. Do you really mean that? I understand your point of view that the tajweed adjustments can be viewed as modulating the foregoing characters. But from a pragmatic point of view we have to be sure that all commonly used current rendering systems can actually do the job, and I have concerns even about the big players. As I think about the issue more I am considering indo-pak masaahif. These differentiate between long and short madd by the weight of the glyph. The subsequent question would be, how do we account for all the other variations of glyphs that may occur in masaahif around the world? This issue comes down, as I think Muhammad rightly points out, to the different aims, all of which we agree with in principle but for which we have different priorities. We would like to be able to easily reproduce the current almost de-facto standard of rendering the qur'aan. You have your noble long term goals of allowing unicode to encode the full richness of arabic text, past, future and present. Can they be reconciled? wassalaam abdulhaq _______________________________________________ General mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/general
