Questions about yeh, hamzah on yeh, alef maksura and dotless ba

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

Dear all,

Recently, someone pointed out to me that I uses the wrong character to
generate the quran text. This is mainly due to my ignorance in
Arabic/Quranic language. I really need to straight things out to get
it correct. Last time, visually it is correct. However, the encoding
wise it might not be. All questions is referring to Madinah Mushaf.
(For those who don't know, I don't speak arabic)

1. Need to confirm about final yeh. Is it true that all occurances of
final yeh is written without the dots?

2. Seems like most referrence I could find saying that alef maksura
occurs only in final forms (for arabic, other languages does have
medial and initial form). I think the word ila (to) , uses alef
maksura (correct me if I'm wrong). However, when the words become
ilaina ( to us), it uses yeh, right? So, may I know which words uses
alef maksura, or it's rule?

3. There are instances in quran where the small alef have chair. Last
time I encode it as alef maksura + small alef. I think for final alef
maksura is correct, but  it is wrong when it occurs in initial or
medial forms. Example: Sura 104 aya 5(initial) and sura 102 aya 1
(medial). I chose alefmaksura because it seems like it is alef.
However, from above, seems like alef maksura only occur in final form.
So, it should be a different character. So, what character it should
be? Someone suggest it is dotless ba. If it is true, can someone
explain, the use (description) of dotless ba? Unicode document does
not say much.

4. Hamza on yeh (U+0626). Should I use this character or not?Mr Yousif
(Quran Project leader) against the use of it. Instead, suggest to use
yeh + hamza above/below. Because I want to make it compatible with
him, I uses alef maksura + hamza above/below. However, seems like it
is wrong. I choose alef maksura over yeh because to make it compatible
with other font (other font most likely to render the yeh with dots).
The other problem is, in unicode document, it specifically mentioned
hamza "above". However, in the mushaf, it render the hamza depending
on context, either above or below. In my font implementation, the
hamza will appear depending on the mark, so no problem. However, other
font might not be "intelligent" enough. So, the question again, should
0626 be use? I personally think it should be use. The problem of above
or below, we just need to educate unicode and other vendors.


Wassalam.