>>It's <ARABIC LETTER ALEF MAKSURA> [U+0649]. Its ISOLATED and FINAL >>forms are like <ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH> [U+06CC], so we show it in >>the layout as INITIAL form.<<
But doesn't ALEF MAKSURA appear mostly at the end of words, i.e. in its final or isolated forms? What's more, in Arabic, when you add a personal suffix (etc.) to ALEF MAKSURA, it will assume medial/initial forms *with dots*... (This is why I found the dotless initial form on your draft keyboard difficult to interpret.) >>As Roozbeh said, some characters only use in Koranic texts.<< I wonder where you have drawn the border line between Unicode characters that are used only in Koranic texts, and other symbols such as cantillation marks or calligraphic elements such as U+FDF4, U+FDFA, U+FDFB, etc. (these Unicode values are given for reference only, not because I advocate making Arabic presentation forms available via direct keyboard input). Traditionally, there have been special calligraphic fonts for all these add-on characters but they weren't easy to handle. I wonder whether it would not make sense to design a special (extended) keyboard for them, which may go hand-in-hand with the creation of suitable OT fonts. Are there any efforts made in this direction? Lastly, a question related to the SHIFT+8 key: It's presently ASTERISK (U+002A, but wouldn't it be more appropriate for Farsi context to use this position for the ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR (U+066D) symbol, and move the ASTERISK somewhere else, e.g. to ALT+8? Strangely, the ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR symbol has *six* points in Arial Unicode MS and *eight* points in Tahoma. How comes? :-) Best regards, Peter _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
