Arabic Unicode fonts

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

I've been looking into Arabic fonts lately and have the following
question/observation.  From "The Unicode Standard" book on Unicode's
website,

  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/ch08.pdf

in Chapter-8 p.194 they note something along these lines,

	Many other ligatures forms are optional - depending on
        the font and application.  Some of these forms are encoded
        in the ranges FB50-FDFF and FE70-FEFE.  However, these forms
        should NOT be used in general interchange.  It is also not
        expected that every Arabic font will contain all of these
        forms, nor that these forms will include all representation
        forms used by every font.

NOTE: in unicode land the following nomenclature is used,

       FB50..FDFF <--> Arabic Presentation Forms-A
       FE70..FEFE <--> Arabic Presentation Forms-B

I see the statement above as a major problem area (unless I'm completely
misunderstanding something here).  The 0600-06FF arabic code-table is by
all means NOT complete (there are no shaped letters -- only one form of
'seen' for example).  Arabic Forms-B, on the other hands, provides everything
else that I can think of which leads me to believe that the generic Arabic
code-table needs to be extended since it alone is worthless; am I missing
something here ?  Forms-B is only missing the Arabic numbers and punctuation.

The reason I'm saying this is because I've already seen plenty of Arabic fonts
out on the 'net that claim to be iso8859-6 yet they are NOT usable since they
are missing Forms-B.  Moreover, I'm baffled to why unicode used up the
0600-06FF code-table to include a plethora of non-arabic glyphs, thus rendering
Arabic and the other languages included incomplete (they include glyphs for
Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Turkic, Moroccan Arabic, Adighe, Ingush, etc, etc).
My concern here is not utopian in nature (although that would be nice), I'm
just thinking of what's standard -- I want to make sure there is a SOLID
standard that every single Arabic ISO font out there will follow without
ambiguity or missing/optional features.  If I type a document using an ISO
font and I email it to someone else how has different ISO fonts - he/she
should be able to read it as long as both of us used an ISO-compliant font
(and we had the same encodings, but that's a different story - assume we do;
I'll start a different thread on that one :-).

Why didn't unicode.org break up the glyphs into the following groupings
instead ?

 1. Strictly Arabic glyphs (excluding any other language except Persian since
    there are a few letters there used by Arabs - vee, etc) including all the
    variant shaped letters/numbers/punctuation.

 2. Strictly Arabic-derived (ie. non-Arabic - Urdu, Pashto, etc) including
    all the variant shaped letters/numbers/punctutation.

If one were to use Arabic, he'd need Forms-B implicitly along with the main
"Arabic (0600..06FF)" code-tables anyways so why seperate them and make their
inclusion optional ???

Note this link,

  http://www.unicode.org/charts/web.html

With that said, why doesn't unicode note this is bold letters somewhere so
that people are aware of it -- even the other arabic-derived languages are not
usable unless they include Forms-A.  It certainly would have been cleaner to
break this, as noted above, into two distinct fully encompassed self-contained
groups.  Plus their wording, above, of "not expected that every Arabic font
will contain all of these forms" - whaaaaaaaat ? --- It better !!  How does
one guarantee that _ALL_ the forms/glyphs are available unless the font and
the spec. specified it as such.

This is truly bewildering (and dangerous since its not stated or discussed on
unicode.org's site)..

Am I missing something here ??

 - Nadim

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