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w3c / alreq

Documenting gaps and requirements for support of Arabic and Persian on the Web and in eBooks.
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Does a final KASHMIRI YEH have a circle below it in Naskh style fonts? #271

Open r12a opened 7 months ago

r12a commented 7 months ago

In Nastaliq style text, KASHMIRI YEH has the following positional forms:

kashmiri_yeh

The circle appears below the left-joining and dual-joining glyphs, but does not appear below the right-joining and isolate glyphs.

Some documents appear to indicate that all positional forms have a circle below when the text is rendered in Naskh style. These include:

  1. the Unicode Standard, v15 pp 391-392 and 392-393 and the reference glyph in the charts
  2. PASCII (Perso-Arabic Standard for Information Interchange) Version 1.0 (which influenced the Unicode text)
  3. occasional articles talking about Kashmiri, such as this one (these are not usually reliable sources of authoritative information)

In all of these sources the text is in the Naskh style and isolate form and the base character looks like FARSI YEH: the only distinguishing factor for the isolate form between KASHMIRI YEH and FARSI YEH is the presence of the circle below.

This is also the way the isolate KASHMIRI YEH glyph is represented in the Noto naskh fonts.

Screenshot 2023-11-07 at 13 47 46

In SIL's Scheherazade New font, however, the base shapes are differentiated in a way similar to the nastaliq forms.

Screenshot 2023-11-07 at 13 50 08

Kashmiri text written in naskh style is not very common, and i haven't seen this in the wild in actual text.

The question is whether the information in the Unicode Standard about the naskh isolate form having a circle below is correct?

Or is this perhaps something that originated because authors cited above didn't have an appropriate glyph for KASHMIRI YEH (added to Unicode in v6.0 (late 2010) and used this as a device to distinguish KASHMIRI and FARSI YEH glyph shapes in their charts?

r12a commented 7 months ago

Comments on the Proposed Arabic Letter Kashmiri Yeh says:

Experts opined that the glyph of the “Kashmiri Yeh” as shown in the in the proposal is never used

and

The annotations for the code points U+06EA, U+06CC were proposed (L2/09-406) since some of the Kashmiri writers were using U+06CC and U+06EA in combination to render different variant of the Kashmiri Yeh. With the independent encoding of the “Kashmiri Yeh” these annotations are not required.

This seems to be clear that a final/isolated form of KASHMIRI YEH with circle below is just a workaround for authors who couldn't use the nastaliq shape (only introduced to Unicode in 2009), and that it wasn't a single code point either, but rather a combination of 06EA + 06CC.

r12a commented 7 months ago

The Unicode Script Ad Hoc committee has concluded that the reference glyph for isolate FARSI YEH in the standard was a mistake, and we plan to contact font vendors to encourage them to change the glyph shape in naskh fonts.