TImwi wrote Are you sure the problem is with Unicode
itself, and
not with your
browser or operating system? Unicode doesn't
"render" anything, Unicode
only specifies what codepoint corresponds to what
letter. I don't know
any Arabic, but if I type random Arabic letters in
Windows 2000 Notepad,
they are indeed rendered as different shapes
depending on whether each
letter is isolated, intial, medial, or terminal. It
is not Unicode
itself that does this, it should be done by your
operating system.
Se�or Pablo wrote some smart clarification on the
issue already :: "Unicode is already widely used to
write Arabic. The problems are mainly on the bidi
side of things (when portions of latin script are
mixed inside an arabic flow); I haven't heard of any
problem regarding the shape of letters; and if
needed, then ZWJ and ZWNJ can be used (Farsi language
does, for example)."
There is an summary here by Markus Kuhn:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
-S-
Excerpt:
"Why are there no Indic or Syriac glyphs in the
ucs-fonts package?"
"In European and East Asian scripts, each Unicode
character can be represented by a single graphical
shape ("glyph"). The X11 font system is entirely built
around the idea that there is a one-to-one
relationship between characters and glyphs, which
works fine for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Han,
Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, etc. However, things are
far more complicated for handwritten cursive scripts
such as Arabic, Syriac and the various Indic scripts
(Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, etc.). For these scripts, the
sequence of values ("characters") encoded in a Unicode
string (which usually corresponds to the sequence of
keystrokes during entry and the sequence of phonemes
when speaking) first has to be converted into a
sequence of graphical symbols ("glyphs") as they are
found in a font, before a string can be displayed. "
"...The Unicode standard does contain encoding ranges
for a simple scheme of Arabic glyphs, the "Arabic
Presentation Forms". This was possible, because for
Arabic there is a reasonably good consensus among font
designers on how many glyphs are actually necessary
for proper rendering of Arabic text, even though some
argue that for really high-quality typesetting the
Unicode collection of Arabic presentation forms is not
sufficient. For Indic scripts on the other hand, there
seems no consensus among font designers, which glyphs
are actually necessary as this can vary significantly
across different font styles."
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