11/8/2011 7:24 PM, Andreas Prilop wrote:
There is a non-standard alif-lam ligature in the Arabic script.
The logo of Al Arabiya shows an example.
The logo as on page http://www.alarabiya.net looks like a rather special
way of writing the name, but that’s what logos are.
Which fonts have such an alif-lam ligature?
Do some fonts have it, and does the ligature appear in text rendering,
as opposite to display of logos? I would expect it to be a special
rendering style, much like in handwriting we produce combinations of
letters that correspond to ligatures.
> Should I write U+0627 ZWJ U+0644 to obtain the ligature? Or
> should I write U+0627 ZWNJ U+0644 to prevent the ligature?
Those would be the character-level tools. But normally I would expect
people to use higher-level protocols, such as commands in a typesetting
program or style sheets applied to entire blocks of text.
Or is alif-lam outside the scope of Unicode and just
regarded as a logo?
It’s not a logo as such, but any use that is restricted to logos should
probably be considered as external to Unicode. If there are fonts that
contain an alif-lam ligature, then I would expect it to be regarded as a
possible rendering of a character pair. Typographic ligatures are
normally encoded as characters in Unicode only if they exist as
characters in some other character code in use.
Yucca
