Re: Tanween variants and Unicode

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Mete Kural <metek at touchtonecorp dot com> wrote:
> Looks like this company [quranpak.com] is doing what many others such
> as Harf, etc are doing; using their own non-standard encoding scheme.
> It might be partially based on Unicode but it's surely not Unicode
> since Unicode yet does not support all the features necessary for
> Quran printing. They've done a good job mashallah.

This is partially why I'm saying let's give the various missing
characters/glyphs their own entries in the character code tables.

What happens now is that various vendors want to encode a character
say the assimilated tanween (I hope Gregg is happy :-) and simply
end-up randomly picking a non-used location which doesn't necessarily
equate to what another vendor is using.  I'm not talking about display,
I'm simply noting that it would be best to leave it to the end-user
to pick and choose what characters/glyphs he/she would like to utilize.

> The argument that older font technologies are incapable of rendering the
> sequence correctly is not something that interests me personally. To give an

It might not interest you yet you should not impede others from being
innovative in case they want to solve this problem in a different manner.
The argument that a character should not exist due to the fact that there
are other means (notably advanced font technology) to get the job done is
not something everyone would buy into.  Unicode is filled with examples
that would argue against this stance and saying "they made a mistake and
we can't correct it now due to legacy" is a cop-out.  Simply put we need
to add 5-6 new characters and leave it be.  At that point everyone will
be happy - the people into font technology can proceed to do what they'd
like and those using older/different methods can have a unified/standard
means to denote data.

> 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?

That's upto me (and all developers and users) to decide.  Unicode is not
a rendering specification and it should NOT dictate how I am to proceed
to do what I'd like to do - as such, I simply need the various characters
to be given their own code-point (within 0600-06FF or FE70-FEFF) and I'd
happy disappear.  You might have a very particular means to come up with
the results and you might be very justified in your current thinking but
why exclude others in pursuing other options either in addressing this
using older technologies and/or pursuing future alternatives.  The characters
(or glyphs - depending on how you name them) exist and they need to be
accounted for.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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