Egmont Koblinger wrote: > "Basic Arabic shaping, at the level of a typewriter, is > straightforward enough to be implemented in the application, using > presentation form characters, as I suggest". Could you please point > out the problems with this statement? As multiple people have pointed out, Arabic presentation forms don't cover the whole Arabic script and are not generally recommended for new applications, though they are not formally deprecated.
If you take a look at the parallel discussion about italics in plain text, you will see a corollary in the use of Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols: they look tempting and are (usually) easy to render, but among other things, they only cover [A-Za-zıȷΑ-Ωα-ω] and thus miss much of the text that may need to be italicized. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org
