--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

> Looking at the assignment of code points in Unicode for Arabic suggests
> that the creators of Unicode have been rather slow to realize how
> essential it is to use proper forms (initial, medial, final, and
> stand-alone), to have shaping and joining, along with (at least for
> Nasta`liq) positioning of (what? Phrases? Letter groups?).

No. The principle of Unicode is that the characters of the text are responsible for conveying the basic text, and that it is the renderer's job, in conjunction with any application-specific mark-up, to deal with such 'routine' matters as shaping and joining. Arabic ligatures, accented letters (as opposed to letters plus accent characters) and Hangul syllables are hated compromises to allow the use of limited rendering technologies, and such compound characters are no longer added. Thus, although new Arabic letters are added from time to time, new 'presentation forms' are not.

Richard.