Re: Quranic Proposal - Dynamic glyph substitution with OpenType

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Thomas Milo <t dot milo at chello dot nl> wrote:
> > Mohammed, Nadim, and Abdulhaq, in that case you should
> > be able to re-design your Quran font as an OpenType
> > font and implement the behaviour that Tom is
> > suggesting for tanweens and other cases. As he says,
> > it seems that OpenType already handles dynamically
> > substituting a single glyph for a sequence of
> > codepoints. This way additional characters will not be
> > necessary except for a new "chairless hamza" and a new
> > logical character for trigerring variant tanween
> > glyphs (are there any others?)
> 
> In order to cut through the red tape, I suggest to build the correct
> Arabic-alone behaviour for hamza using U+0621. We successfully did that
> already for sequences like lam-hamza-alif. We are still working on sequences
> of the type yaa'-hamza-<any connecting letter> as in /y���
yaHy���/.
> 
> In the mean time, a proposal should be made to add a new Arabic letter
> floating hamza to the standard that is conditionally equivalent to U+0621.

To be fair and to compare apples-to-apples, can we see a listing of all
the new characters (a simple numbered list would do) that would be proposed
with a rendering engine solution as well as all the characters that are
currently in unicode that would be obsoleted ?

Thomas (not sure if my questions are reaching you, but here goes another
one), how long do you expect such technologies making its way to the
end-user from the likes of microsoft and/or adobe (and I'm not talking
about hacking/creating something on our own either) ?

Finally, why is this "font technology" only specific to Arabic - why aren't
such things being proposed and/or discussed and pursued (and maybe they
are) for umlaut-type characters in German/Swedish/etc (out of curiosity) ?

Salam.

 - Nadim



	
		
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