Re: Sequential Fathatan Final Form (Items 9 and 10)

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

Salaam Mohammed,

This is the sequential fathatan final form (items 9
and 10) thread.

>   You forgot that you cannot know what the needed
> glyph is based on
>   context.
>   If it's Qur'an, the proposed glyph is needed, if
> it's regular text, the more
>   simple one is needed.
>   How can you expect a font to know if it's
> rendering Qur'an or not?
>   Do you expect us to add a proposal to the specs of
> OpenType to force the
>   user to tell it first if he/she is using the
> Qur'an before rendering?

Good humor :-) The context I'm talking about is the
characters adjacent to the sequential fathatan. The
sequential fathatan found before an alef but after a
connecting letter will look like the image in Item 9.
The sequential fathatan found before an alef but after
a non-connecting letter will look like the image in
Item 10.

>   I won't go any further but I want to make a final
> point.
>   Depending on OpenType means simply that we cannot
> use regular fonts
>   and that means that we won't be able to see the
> Qur'an in the Linux Console
>   for example since it needs bitmap fonts.
>   Another thing is redundancy, for every OpenType
> font out there, you need to
>   'well, program it!' with the same instructions
> over and over again.
>   The last thing is, what will be the case when
> people stop using OpenType?
>   I can see some more people (after we die) will
> start from here again and try
>   to add them to Unicode.

It does not matter to Unicode what font technology is
used behind the scenes. Be it OpenType, ATSUI,
Graphite, or bitmap fonts, Unicode does not care.
Unicode defines how the encoding should be done and
how the result should look like, but doesn't impose on
what font technology should be used in the process. So
before OpenType dies, another better font technology
would probably appear that does all this much better
than OpenType does. And in terms of the redundancy you
mention, all of this dynamic substitution
functionality is built into OpenType, it's not like
you're writing C++ code here. You can use Microsoft's
WYSIWYG tools if you wish.

>   Mete, again I agree with Nadim that we need some
> time but to be
>   honest, I answered to all your criticisms
> "reasonably" and you kept
>   ignoring them.

Mohammed, I cannot possibly respond to every point you
make because you make "a lot" of points :-) I have a
day time job among other things to worry about too.
Please be more concise in the future and insha'Allah I
will try to respond to as many points of yours as I
can.

Kind regards,
Mete