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

[Mohammed Yousif <mhdyousif at gmx dot net>]

On Saturday 31 December 2005 13:03, Thomas Milo wrote:
>
> 2. font technology to handle them (e.g. how to build a font that can handle
> U+0621 HAMZA correctly, or position superscript alef correctly when
> preceded by a fatha)
>

That's of course if you mean by superscript alef, the vowel mark not the Alef
Madd replacement which has no seat even though it comes after a fatha
(Actually, it comes after a fatha because it inhereted this from the letter
it replaced "Alef Madd, a regular Alef but in the Madd context" which also
comes after fatha "because of the Madd").

> In theory I concur with this position. On the orher hand, people _are_ used
> to typing alef maqsura when they thinh it is appropriate. And the problem
> is, when do they think it's appropriate? Would Egyptians type /alii/
> (personal name) with a maqsura to get rid of the dots? Probably yes, so
> that's something Unicode did not plan for it...
>

As an Egyptain, I "like most Egyptains" don't use Alef Maksura for Ali for the
very basic reason that Alef Maksura in most Arabic software has only a final
and isolated shapes. So, for the sake of being consistent, I use U+064A for
typing Ali even though I dislike it and I would never use these two dots
in writing Ali in with a paper and a pen.

Others may forget about being consistent and "tailor" it to look right (i.e.
using U+064A in all places but final and isolated, Alef Maksura for final and
isolated). This is especially common if the typist is not knowledgable in
character encoding and such.
As an example, my personal ID, although printed using a MS Windows
PC, doesn't have these two dots below the final yeh in my name but oddly
enough my driving license (also printed using a MS Windows PC) has
these two dots!

> How about maintaining two separate codes for yeh and amqsura, but treating
> them as equivalent insearching?
>

I would treat them as equivalent if the user who search intends to ignore
vowel marks. That is Alef Maksura can be treated equivalnet to
Yeh+SuperscriptAlef which can be and is used outside Qur'anic texts, even in
handwriting, I use them to  BTW

-- 
Mohammed Yousif
Egypt

"قال قائل منهم إني كان لي قرين. يقول أءنك لمن المصدقين. أءذا متنا وكنا تراباً 
وعظاماً أءنا لمدينون. قال هل أنتم مطلعون. فاطلع فرءاه في سواء الجحيم. قال
تالله إن كدت لتردين. ولولا نعمة ربي لكنت من المحضرين"  (من القرءان الكريم)