2

I am looking for a Unicode equivalent of an Arabic word featuring dotless letters FEH and NOON:

enter image description here

This is to mimic a handwriting style that doesn't use dots.

I've found:

ARABIC LETTER DOTLESS FEH (U+06A1)

but I can't find non-isolated (contextual) versions of it.

E.g. the normal (dotted) FEH has these five contextual forms:

enter image description here

I'm looking for the same but without the dot. Do they exist?

2

1 Answer 1

10

By policy, UNICODE does not assign code points for contextual variants. Some contextual variants are in by exception—their purpose is to guarantee round-trip equivalence with some older legacy standards that were in existence before UNICODE. So you should go with the single code point for ARABIC LETTER DOTLESS FEH (U+06A1) and let the typesetting engine do the contextualisation. When the engine does not reproduce the handwriting faithfully, you can hint the contextual variant using one of the two characters ZERO WIDTH JOINER and ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER.

EDIT: This means in particular, that you should not use the available contextual variants for encoding the Arabic script and treat them as deprecated or compatibility only characters.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.