Re: Quranic Proposal - Conclusions

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam Mohammed, Nadim, and Abdulhaq,

Mohammed, it looks like we are not reaching each other
with this umlaut vs. fathatan discussion. I don't want
to go around in circles any more. We have discussed
and discussed, we have agreed on somethings, and
disagreed on others. If we don't agree, we don't
agree. Time is the best medicine :-) In due time we
may resolve more differences.

Nadim (and others) so let me specify herein what
changes I am suggesting should be done to the Quran
Characters Proposal. I'll list item by item.

Items 1, 2, and 3:
Should be removed from the joint proposal and a
seperate Arabeyes.org-only proposal should be created
for requesting that codepoints be added to Unicode for
sequential fathatan, sequential dammatan, and
sequential kasratan. This way what we both agree on
will be distinguished from what we don't agree on.

Items 4,5, and 6:
I am assuming that we have agreed on what we should do
about these items. The agreement was that the already
existing small meem in the Arabic code block can be
used together with damma, fatha and kasra to represent
the glyphs in 4, 5, and 6. In this case, we need to
change the proposal for 4,5,6 and instead of
requesting that new characters be added, we should
request that the sequences fatha+small_meem,
damma+small_meem, and kasra+small_meem be defined to
represent the allographs in items 4,5, and 6
respectively.

Item 7:
We have already brought this case to the attention of
the Unicode group a while ago and suggested that a new
allograph be added to the contexual behaviour of
U+0621 when it's between two connecting letters. It
was met with fierce resistence from the Unicode Farsi
computing community and jusifiably so since this would
break existing Farsi texts. Therefore the only other
alternative we were left with was to propose a new
Arabic character "Arabic Chairless Hamza" and declare
it "conditionally" equivalent to U+0621. Tom can
supply this section since he has already been working
on this proposal.

Item 8:
This item should be removed from the joint proposal
and added to the seperate Arabeyes.org-only proposal.

Item 9 and 10:
These items should be removed from the joint proposal.
My recommendation would be not to add these items even
to the Arabeyes.org-only proposal because these two
items are already covered by Item 1, sequential
fathatan. These cases are just contexual instances of
the sequential fathatan proposed in Item 1. These
should not be seperate codepoints but rather contexual
instances of Item 1 which should be documented as part
of the Arabeyes.org-only proposal for Item 1. Fonts
can easily substitute the necessary glyphs for these
cases.

Items 11 and 12:
These items should be removed from the proposal.
Similar to the above, these Items are covered by Item
4, fatha with small meem. These two items are simply
contexual instances of the fatha with small meem
allograph proposed in joint proposal for Item 4. These
should not be seperate codepoints but rather contexual
instances of Item 4 which should be documented as part
of the joint proposal for Item 4. Fonts can easily
substitute the necessary glyphs for these cases.

Kind regards,
Mete