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Dear Mohammed,
Here is a more elaborate version of my
comment. The real version need to be a PDF. BTW, do you know whether I can
attach PDF's in mail to this lists?
> For instance, the special cases of
tanween
> fall in the domain of character encoding, There is already 06E2 arabic small high meem isolated form that combines with preceding fatha and dhamma (with 06ED arabic small low meem isolated form should be considered a positional variant of 06E2 for rendering kasra+small meem); the other tanween variation can be proven to be a horizontally arranged repetition of the vowel signs, ergo there is no need for new code points. I can send you scans of such calligraphy, I you need any proof. The special effect of a slightly offset groep of two fatha or kasra signs is a typographical innovation of the 1924 Egyptian Qur'an that can easily be handled by font technology. Our own DecoType ACE (Arabic Calligraphic Engine) is already enabled to handle these effects correctly. For OpenType it is also a simple glyph adjustment of the substitution tables. > whereas special positioning of superscript alif > as well as trailing alifs falls in the domain of script > rendering or font technology. The present proposal correctly describes the cases with trailing alifs ligatures and since it proposes to add them to the block of Presentation Forms (FD40 - FD43), we should all agree that they fall in the domain of typography. Such glyphs do not belong in the Unicode Standard, the inclusion of the Presenation Forms was a political compromise never meant to be implemented. The special positioning of superscript alif that this proposal requests to be encoded as a character is in fact only visible in the metal typesetting produced for the King Fuaf Qur'an and the handwritten clone of this typeface used for the King Fahd Qur'an. The same spelling, when written in older qur'ans falls in line with the rules of real Islamic calligraphy and does not behave in the way the present proposal considers standard. The combination of fatha with superscript alif does not make the superscript alif a new letter, grapheme or encodable character. It just causes a typesetting problem that can be solved by font technology or by using calligraphic madda (Persian: keshideh). Lingguistically, the graphemic load of this superscript alif does not differ, it is just a contextual variation. Superscript alif in the contemporary Arabic standard Qur'an is used in the following three manners: 1. stand-alone superscript alif on waw occurs on only eight words (all of them borrowings from Syriac), always with a fatha on the preceding syllable: حَیَوٰة، ربَوٰا۟، زَكَوٰة، صَلَوٰة، غَدَوٰة، مِـشْكَوٰة، مَنَوٰة، نجَوٰة 2. stand-alone superscript alif on unmarked yaa' (yaa' witout dots, or "alif maqsuura" which according to the latest version of the Unicode Standard must be shaped for both non-final position and final position), , always with a fatha on the preceding syllable: non-final: فَسَوَّىٰهُنَّ Q2:29، مِیكَىٰلَ Q2:29، ٱشْتَرَىـٰهُ Q2:29 final: عَلَیٰ 3. In all other cases superscript alif is combined with hamza. As for the comparison of non-spacing superscript alif and the proposed spacing superscript alif with non-spacing and spacing small yaa' (U+06E6 and U+06E7), this is only correct from an engineering point of view. Such an approach does not take into the equation the linguistic or graphemic load of small high yaa'. U+06E7 is ued to annotate a full letter yaa' when it is missing from the rasm, e.g.: Q2:61 ٱلنَّبِیِّــۧنَ
U+06E6 is not a contextual variation of U+06E7, but a word-final only trailing small yaa' which is used to mark the long pronunciation of short kasra of the pronominal suffix {-h} in cases where the preceding syllable has a short vowel. To mark prolongation of the short damma in final position under similar conditions, U+06E5 small waw is used in the same manner. Examples: Q2:22 بِهِۦ
Q2:16 حَوْلَهُۥ
> I see no confusion at all, sukun
like signs in the Qur'an are clearly
> defined in the unicode standard (using the same names that the > hard copy of the Qur'an uses). I was referring to a proposal to the Unicode
Cosnrtium - which I opposed - to encode a new Qur'anic character
character, that turned out to be identical to 06E0 ARABIC SMALL HIGH
UPRIGHT ZERO. The same proposal suggested that regular 0651 ARABIC SUKUN should
be used to represent the sign that was identical in function to
06DF ARABIC SMALL HIGH ROUNDED ZERO. You and I know these signs were already
encoded. I hope I can convince you that 06E1 ARABIC SMALL HIGH DOTLESS HEAD OF
KHAH is a redundant glyph variant of 0651 ARABIC SUKUN . This form of Sukun (as
it is clearly called in the supplement of the Qur'an that you are referring to)
only occurs in the Standard Arabic Qur'an where 06DF ARABIC SMALL HIGH ROUNDED
ZERO looks like a normal, rounded Sukun. In other words, this is a font
issue, not a character issue. Sukun is sukun, whether it looks like a chicken or
an egg (i.e., whteher it looks like ra's khah or small heh).
> As I noted above, I don't like the idea of delegating everything to fonts as > this is not the right thing to do. As you can see, I fully agreee with you regarding the position of font technology relative to encoding; we only need to synchronise our analysis. > I can send you a "well designed" font
that can display the Qur'an perfectly
> using only ASCII characters but this is not good at all. Thank you. I don't think I can bear the sight
of such fonts. I prefer real Qur'anic script.
Thomas
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