Re: Quranic Proposal

[abdulhaq <al-arabeyes at alinsyria dot fsnet dot co dot uk>]

Dear Thomas

On Sunday 13 June 2004 13:27, Thomas Milo wrote:
> The use of repeated damma/fatha/kasra is just an example of how it could
> be done. For modern font technology internal glyph substition is a trivial
> matter. Internally two Unicodes can be made a single glyph (=ligature) or
> one Unicode can make many glyphs (for instance multiple pen strokes to
> build one letter).

Please bear with me and follow it through on the technological/rendering 
side. What current font _standard_ never mind implementation will take two 
dammas and accent the base glyph by offsetting the second identical accent 
automatically from the first?

I am not a font expert so please be patient with me, but do the current 
definitions of glyph substitution allow for two identical subsequent accents 
to be overlaid on the base glyph in a offset way?

How can Mac OS X be expected to take a font of whatever modern standard and 
to know that the second glyph in a damma/damma sequence is not simply 
overlaid the first, but offset, and how will it know how much to offset it? 
I know that there are multiple marks available on a base glyph but I'm not 
familiar with the intricate details of how the various accent glyphs are 
located onto the correct mark.

A method I can think of off the top of my head is that a new code such as 
'damma offset' or 'ikhfaa' is introduced which could be added as a second 
accent character in the text stream. I think you can guess that I don't like 
it much :-)


>This is in fact exactly how I analyse Arabic script and why I consider the
>existing legacy code industrial trash. However, in our present discussion we
>are looking for ways to make the best of the existing Arabic block in
>Unicode.

I agree that this is how script is best rendered, but I am very surprised if 
you mean that text should be coded like this. Do you really mean that?

I understand your point of view that the tajweed adjustments can be viewed as 
modulating the foregoing characters. But from a pragmatic point of view we 
have to be sure that all commonly used current rendering systems can 
actually do the job, and I have concerns even about the big players.

As I think about the issue more I am considering indo-pak masaahif. These 
differentiate between long and short madd by the weight of the glyph. The 
subsequent question would be, how do we account for all the other variations 
of glyphs that may occur in masaahif around the world?

This issue comes down, as I think Muhammad rightly points out, to the 
different aims, all of which we agree with in principle but for which we 
have different priorities.

We would like to be able to easily reproduce the current almost de-facto 
standard of rendering the qur'aan.

You have your noble long term goals of allowing unicode to encode the full 
richness of arabic text, past, future and present.

Can they be reconciled?


wassalaam
abdulhaq