Re: Arabic (was Re: [I18n]Syriac)

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Followup to:  <Pine.LNX.4.10.10107060447560.32178-100000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
By author:    Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh@xxxxxxxxxx>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
> > 
> > Why not submit a proposal to include them to Unicode?
> 
> They are not characters. They are glyphs. The only reason they have
> encoded the current presentations forms is legacy character sets (I have
> heard that it was the Egypt government who pushed them). And both Unicode
> and JTC1/SC2/WG2 have agreed not to encode any more presentation forms
> (unless they exist in a character set used before 1991).
> 
> I completely understand their idea, and agree with it. The presentation
> forms are against the sense of the standards. Yes, I know that if they
> didn't exist, good Unicode Arabic support would have needed to wait more,
> but in that case, we would have already agreed to the infrastructure
> needed for other cursive scripts, Indic ones, Syriac, and Tibetan (any
> missing?).
> 

There is a legitimate need for encoding of presentation forms, though,
and there is some benefit to a system which encodes both in the same
namespace.  It would be useful to have a parallel standard, or
something, which would give code points to presentation forms; perhaps
this would be a good use for the recently illegalized high planes.

	-hpa
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