Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 18:02:36 +0200
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi>
Beesley:
It's curious that the Arabic Presentation Forms got
into Unicode at all, and a number of people still think
it was a mistake, a sell-out. One of the Fathers of Unicode
told me they were deprecated. Even the Unicode specification
explains their presence rather apologetically.
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi>
Well, one reason that often comes up with Unicode is that they want to
have a 1:1 round-tripping from any legacy encoding to Unicode and back.
So if some existing old encoding had the Arabic presentation forms,
Unicode had to have them.
Yes, though I gather that even this principle of "1:1 round-tripping"
must have been a source of conflict within the Unicode Committee.
The same Father of Unicode called the implementation of Korean script
(with a codepoint for each syllable) "a huge waste of code space".
In the case of Arabic, the presence of the Presentation Forms, with
the availability of "Unicode Fonts", is probably a hindrance to the
development of proper Arabic rendering engines. People too easily
get the idea that they are _supposed_ to render Arabic using the
Presentation Forms, that this is the way it _should_ be done.
And that's unfortunate.
So even if the Presentation Forms can be defended on the grounds
of backward compatibility to some (which?) old font, anybody
looking forward should avoid them.
Ken
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Kenneth R. Beesley
ken(_dot_)beesley(_at_)xrce(_dot_)xerox(_dot_)com
Xerox Research Centre Europe Tel from France: 04 76 61 50 64
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