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Re: Proposal for the Basis of a Codepoint Extension to Unicodeforthe Encoding of the Quranic Manuscripts



Hi Mete

first off, I respect yours and Thomas' opinions. Of course we will end up 
having to agree to differ. In this forum really we are just influencing Meor, 
M Yusuf et al. in the work they do - they can choose whichever method they 
want of course, we can only give ideas. I really don't mind which solution 
they choose (honestly!).

I don't expect what I say here to affect Thomas and hence Unicode, as Thomas 
already has long-thought-out, well-formed and detailed plans of his own in 
this regard.

> >The other is that this solution, as I understand it, depends on OpenType
> >capability font rendering to work.
>
> It doesn't depend on OpenType capability. OpenType is just one of the font
> technologies you can use to build fonts that can render complex Arabic. You
> could surely use any other technology you wish to use. Although the font
> technology you are using will probably have to be advanced enough to do
> certain things such as contexual substitutions, etc. OpenType is just one
> of the technologies which is able to do these.
>

Thomas and yourself are dismissive of older technology. However, most of the 
people in the world who are inclined to view the quran on their PC or 
what-have-you cannot afford to pay MS for their copy of Windows. Why should 
they be excluded from the solution? Who are we doing this for?

>
> We are not proposing to glue two glyphs together. You can compare this
> non-texual character to the ZWNJ (zero width non joiner) character in a way
> (although they are still quite different) in the fact that they are both
> non-texual. I think you are confusing this with Tom's other proposal, which
> is to declare canonival equivalence between a fatha+fatha sequence and
> fathatan, and so forth.  That is a seperate issue. I think we haven't made
> this clear so I apologize. This non-texual character is a seperate request
> regardless of whether there is a request to declare canonival equivalence
> between a fatha+fatha sequence and fathatan, and so forth. Even if there is
> no canonival equivalence declared between a fatha+fatha sequence and
> fathatan this additional codepoint is needed.
>

I do understand what you mean, I'm exaggerating a bit to make a point. But the 
fact remains that if this proposal goes through, then how can I represent two 
fathas side-by-side? Granted, this will not come up often, but if you look at 
arabic grammar books, tajweed books, sarf books etc it's quite possible that 
this would be a requirement. M Yousif made this point a long time ago.

wassalaam
abdulhaq