[Biblical-languages] unicode syriac initial kaph

Peter Kirk peterkirk at qaya.org
Tue Apr 5 12:26:12 EDT 2005


On 05/04/2005 17:09, Joseph Weaks wrote:

>
> On Apr 5, 2005, at 4:59 AM, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Probably, William and Joe, you don't have the right combination of 
>> font and rendering engine for this to work properly. It does seem to 
>> work with Windows XP and the default font in my system. If it doesn't 
>> work with your Mac or whatever, that is a problem with your system 
>> support for Unicode, and not with Unicode.
>
>
> I simply don't see how this is possible. When I test it in Mellel, the 
> character form ܩܩ looks the same for both characters. ...


On my Windows system I get two different shapes here.

> ... Mellel has unparalleled R2L language support across any platform 
> and was essentially written for the purpose of achieving a high level 
> of Unicode R2L support for academics. I can not imagine that it is a 
> failure of the application in this instance.


Mellel indeed claims "Full Syriac support", see 
http://www.redlers.com/generaloptionswithmellel.html. I note from 
http://www.redlers.com/download/tips/WritingInsyriac.pdf (actually the 
Google HTML cache of this, because the PDF crashes Adobe Acrobat) that:

> The only application on Mac OS X that fully supports Syriac is Mellel 
> and this support is given independent of Mac OS X.

But you may need to follow the rest of the instructions on this page, 
including downloading a suitable font. If this still doesn't work, I 
think you will need to contact Mellel support.

> How can a single code point have two different character forms in the 
> font? How would the app know which was the alternative glyph if it 
> detected that a word-final form was called for? Please explain your 
> position in more detail.


I will refer you to 
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch08.pdf, the appropriate 
part of the Unicode standard. Read the section on Syriac, which refers 
you back to the section on Arabic. This explains how in these two 
scripts the rendering engine (not the app) chooses between glyphs 
dependent on context. This is the well-established method of supporting 
Arabic script, which has more recently been extended to Syriac.

-- 
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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