Kasra-ar.isol FE76 mark or letter?

Hi,

i’m wondering why kasha-ar.isol is set as a letter and all the arabic-mark.isol as mark.
Those FE76, FE78, FE7A, FE7C, FE7E are actually spacing glyphs composed from space and the non-spacing version.
Therefore, I think they should be considered as letters, not marks. But if considered marks, they all should.

Or is there any particular reason I don’t know about?

sylvain

This is how they are defined in Unicode. Because if they are marks, they would not be isolated.

Hi,
In arabic we don’t have any mark as a letter, except the Hamza, kasra-ar.isol is should categorized as mark, anyhow you can change that by changing the glyph info, by clicking on [cmd + alt + i]

and simply you can change the glyph width to zero.

When do you even use the isol form of any of them? And what should happen when you input them?

I guess the only use is when you write a grammar book.
I think it should be categorised as letter (even if it probably never make any difference.)
Unicode says it’s a space with a mark so I would consider this to be a letter.

I just wanted to point out that it’s the only mark that is categorised as a letter, so it’d be good to have the same subcategory for all the FE76, FE78, FE7A, FE7C, FE7E.

@qassimhaider Are you editing the GylphData.xml from within the Glyphs UI? If I hit cmd-alt-i I cannot edit anything, just see and create glyphs.

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They are marked as <isolated> 0020 06xx (isolated presentation forms) in Unicode and are supposed to be KC-normalized (compatibility decomposition plus canonical composition). That means they are treated much like the spacing, non-combining accents in Latin, or an isolated Arabic letter. I would therefore probably not redefine them as Mark, because the idea is that they are treated as letters. E.g., in a text discussing marks, and you want to put an example in parenthesis, like ‘this diaeresis (¨)’.

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Edit > Info for Selection (Cmd-Shift-I) is only available in Font view (Cmd-Opt-1).

I agree with Rainer.

@mekkablue this is what I see when I hit cmd-alt-i (while being in Font-View):


How do I get that other window? I never heard of that.
And when I have it, how does it work? Does it make changes for one font-file without changing the GlyhData.xml?

(oh ok, I’m sorry, I assigned cmd-alt-i to Glyph Info ages ago… now I have it.)

Well, Sorry ,after some researches I did, and reviewing some fonts, yes it’s true that kasha-ar.isol as letter or they develop it to be as a letter, yes, true, it’s used in explaining the grammars, and for that case as letter is more practical… and for this of course you need to have width, but I don’t have any idea why these are marks FE76, FE78, FE7A, FE7C, FE7E !

and there is also the following as well: fathatan-ar.medi kasra-ar.isol kasra-ar.medi kashida-ar fatha-ar.medi damma-ar.medi … as letters …

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You are right. They all should be the same category. I fix it.

But as ‘Mark/Spacing’ is treated the same as ‘Letter’ in Glyphs, I think I will set all of them in the ‘Mark’. that way they get sorted closer to the other marks and not among the letters.

I assume you mean Mark & Spacing, parallel to spacing marks in Latin?

This disposal programmatic was not related to the rules of the Arabic language, but it was the solution to some programming problems at that time.

For example: There is a word containing the three characters as composed Glyph “liga”, how you will Marks a glyph?!

you Will not be able to do so only through the decoding of these composed glyph Using this old style (Mark with kashida )