Re: Tanween variants and Unicode

[Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya <meor dot ridzuan at gmail dot com>]

Mete,

You can view samples of pakistan style mushaf at
http://www.quranpak.com/samples.htm . The company sells Quran
publishing software, with the calligraphy style preserved. I've no
idea how they implement it, but I doubt it'll be unicode compliant.
 In any case, I think you already know the difference. The superscript
alef is used as mad symbol (the "a" sound, 2 harakat, without the
fatha) in most other writing style, while in madinah mushaf it only
have small alef, which represent a required alef in pronunciation but
missing in writing. The alef might be mad , might not, but does not
represent the "a" sound. The "a" sound always required a fatha.

You can find standalone small alef at sura 2, aya 72. I'm not sure
about other places.

You can find superscript waw at sura 17, aya 7. I think it only has
one occurance in the Mushaf.

For both tanween ending with meem and sequential one,  we might have
implementation problem because of the following:
For a pure truetype font, it is almost impossible to implement (I
think ), without opentype support (the GSUB table). I think the same
applies to bitmap font.Suppose the rendering engine encounter the
sequence (fathatan + sukun, or fathatan + superscript meem),  the
engine will know that it needs to replace it with a new glyph.
However, since the new glyph does not have a unicode code point, how
is the rendering engine will find the glyph? In truetype, each glyph
has it's own index number, unicode code is optional. However, there is
no standard in ttf which glyph  should be assign to which index no.
So, to my knowledge it is almost impossible to implement this feature
using truetype, bitmap (bdf, windows .fon), and postscript font (not
to sure about the last one, but i think it is the same), unless
someone can tell me how this can be implemented , or some features
that I'm not aware of about these font. This issue does not arise with
opentype, since it has GSUB table. The font designer can easily tell
the rendering engine to substitute the sequence with the glyph he
wants (without the need ot unicode code point). So, please do consider
this issue.

Regards.