RE: Presentation Forms

["Mete Kural" <metek at touchtonecorp dot com>]

"The Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) and Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contain most of the characters with contextual variation as well as the extended characters appropriate for other languages. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are **deprecated** in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: ivon at pads1 dot cs dot nthu dot edu dot tw
Reply-To: Development Discussions <developer at arabeyes dot org>
Date:  Fri, 25 Mar 2005 20:37:46 +0800 (CST)

>
>>--- ivon at pads1 dot cs dot nthu dot edu dot tw wrote:
>>> I found that the arabic_shape.pl only uses Presentation Form-B(0xFExx) 
>>> I can't understand this...  Doesn't it need Form-A?
>>> um .. I am new to Arabic, and sorry if i am senseless. 
>
>>The Arabic language requires some of the characters noted in Form-B 
>>(along with a good portion of U+0600 - U+06FF).  Form-A is noted/titled 
>>as "Arabic Presentation Form-A" yet it is not required or used by the 
>>"Arabic" _language_ (you can think of Form-A as a derivative list 
>>characters that were spawned from Arabic that other languages are using).
>
>
>I don't know if I misunderstood.
>An Arabic input system can only keyin "Arabic" _language_ with codes in 
>U+0600 - U+06FF and it will be shaped to U+FE70 - U+FEFF only. And the 
>Presentation Form-A is newly created codes, which is used to present some 
>terms that Arabic doesn't have it originally. 
>Is that right? ;b
>
>Best Regards,
>-Iven
>
>
>

--
Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
--