Re: Arabic wasla in Unicode

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 05:25:33PM +0200, Miikka-Markus Alhonen wrote:
> 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

Salam Mikka ;)

> 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.

Let's make sure you don't remain passive ;)
> 
> 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.

I read through your proposal. I think your proposal for it to be in U+0656 makes sense,
and should be there. I know I personally have no use for it, but I can see why it would
be useful.

> 
> 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?

I think I have an _idea_.. but I may be wrong. This, after all, is a transparent glyph,
right?

> 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.

There are Unicode 'experts' that drop by every now and then -- I wonder where they are.
I would highly appreciate it if you CC' any contacts you make regarding this matter.


Actually, maybe we should consider the uses of such an addition. I know that through-out
my academic experience, I have never had to have that displayed on its own. It is also
something that will need to have its own mapping to the keyboard, or am I wrong?

Regards,
-- 
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