Re: Tanween variants and Unicode

["Mete Kural" <metek at touchtonecorp dot com>]

Hello Nadim,

From: Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>
>I again highly suggest/encourage that everyone look into the document
>that M.Yousif had put together awhile back to note what is needed and
>what is missing.
>
>  http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/tmp/qu_prop.pdf
>
>it was later formalized into the following document that wasn't
>submitted,
>
>  http://arabeyes.org/~nadim/tmp/unicode_quran_prop.pdf
>

I've known the original one for a long time. I have looked at the new one just now. The small noon, small yeh and small waw are already part of Unicode, though so I don't know why there were listed there.

>You can do whatever substitution you like and/or even spec those out if
>you so desire, but at a minimum (and humor me here) the new scripts need
>their own codepoint (like for sequential fathatan, etc).  We need this
>so that other font technologies (now and in the future) will be able to
>reference them __in a consistent manner__.  We, after all, want to make
>sure that the same text if explicitly written (if one opted not to
>substitute for instance) would work across platforms and fonts.  Let's
>not be restrictive here and have follow in the same spirit of what is
>there now.

The argument that older font technologies are incapable of rendering the sequence correctly is not something that interests me personally. To give an example from another script family, Devanagari which is used in India, you need modern font technology (such as OpenType) to effectively render it because of the complexity of the script. Modern Qur'anic orthography is similarly complex compared to ordinary Arabic text because of the many marks that are added to the text. You won't get away from rendering this kind of orthography without modern font technology anyways. This technology is currently available on Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, you name it. Why do we need to make sure that Madinah Mushaf's Qur'anic orthography renders with legacy font technologies?

>BTW: Mete, do please cite only relevant parts in your replies and don't
>     simply include the originating email in its entirety (the archives
>     are there for those looking to see the entire thing anyway).
>

Will do. Thaks.

Regards,
Mete

--
Mete Kural
Touchtone Corporation
714-755-2810
--