Arabic wasla in Unicode

[Miikka-Markus Alhonen <Miikka-Markus dot Alhonen at tigatieto dot com>]

Hi!

For those who don't know me yet, my name is Miikka-Markus Alhonen (Miikka for
short) and I've been subscribed to this list for a while now, although I have
been quite passive till today :) I have studied Arabic for a couple of years
now and I'm most interested in creating an Arabic-friendly environment in
Linux. I've participated in development of the Unicode editor Yudit and some
other Unicode-related projects, too.

Now I would like to ask you as Arabic language users to comment on my proposal
on adding Arabic wasla in Unicode (can you imagine it's still missing ?!). You
can find the document (PDF) at http://www.tigatieto.com/wasla.pdf (~ 100 kB)

I'm contacting you because I'm not a native speaker of Arabic, myself, and I've
never done an official Unicode proposal, either. So, I would be more than
grateful of any assistance you can give.

The specific problem I have in mind at the moment, is fonts. Does anyone of you
know of a font which would include wasla on its own, i.e. not on top of alif?
What about other computer standards apart from Unicode? Also, I'm not sure if I
should try making such a font myself for the Unicode charts (TTF's are very
troublesome) or should I just tell the UTC to use the glyph for "alif wasla"
without the "alif" part. Well, maybe I'll discuss this with somebody who's a
real Unicode expert.

In any case, I wish you luck with all of your Arabeyes projects. You're doing a
great job!

Best regards!

----------------------------------
E-Mail: Miikka-Markus Alhonen <Miikka-Markus dot Alhonen at tigatieto dot com>
Date: 05-Jan-02
Time: 17:25:31

This message was sent by XFMail
----------------------------------