At 12:34 AM 11/27/2002, Am�lie DELTOUR wrote:
How should the LAM-ALEF ligature be vocalized in Arabic according to Unicode?It will be if the font is a correctly made OpenType font, and the software is using an appropriate version of Microsoft's Unicode Script Processor (Uniscribe), i.e. Windows 2000 or later. It is possible to make the ligature substitution lookups in the OpenType font ignore 'marks' such as FATHA. So the sequence LAM+FATHA+ALEF renders as LAM_ALEF+FATHA. OpenType glyph positioning than then be used to correctly place the FATHA over the LAM_ALEF ligature.
In texts on the Internet, I find the codes in the following order for instance: "U+0644 U+0627 U+064E" (LAM-ALEF-FATHA). The logical order would rather be LAM-FATHA-ALEF.
The problem is that if the LAM-FATHA-ALEF order is used, then the LAM-ALEF ligature is not recognized in common display programs (IE, NS6 or MS Word).
If I understand the Unicode Standard well, the FATHA should be treated as a "transparent character" and should not disturb the representation of the LAM-ALEF ligature. In that case, it would only be an implementation problem of the display programs...
Correct.
However, I can notice that on the Internet, in vocalized texts (Quran, Bible) the LAM-ALEF ligature is most often bad vocalized : the diacritic mark is before the ligature, or after, or in most cases is not there at all (in particular in the case of "li + alef-hamza") - which is quite annoying.This is an incorrect implementation, probably resulting from a convention developed for an older font format in which this character ordering hack has been used to position the diacritic over the LAM_ALEF ligature.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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