Re: Arabic wasla in Unicode

["N. Heer" <heer at u dot washington dot edu>]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Chahine M. Hamila wrote:

> >  (snip) If one needed to
> > have waslah by itself in a font, why not just consider it a glyph rather
> > than a part of the character set?
>
> Mmmmm... not impossible through hacks... But then, we could find ourselves with
> zillions of incompatible ways to represent it when storing text (unless I
> misunderstood you). So the cleanest way imho is that it should indeed be
> standardized one way or another and include it in a (common, standard) charset.
>

Yes, you are right.  There would be no standard position in a character
set in which to store the waslah.  You would store it in a vacant position
or in the position of some character you didn't need in a particular font
and it would only be displayed as waslah if you viewed the text or printed
it with that font.  In the Latin alphabet diacritics needed for
specialized texts are often handled that way.  On the other hand with
Unicode you can have so many more characters than the 255 we've been used
to that maybe waslah should be added to Unicode.

					Nicholas

> Regards,
> Chahine
>
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