Two Arabic characters connected together

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asar
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Location: City: Kuantan, state: Pahang, country: Malaysia

Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by asar »

Morning everybody.
I have a new problem that related to Arabic characters: its about the situation of character "Lam Initial Form: FEDF" with a diacritic "Arabic Fatha: 064e", connected with character "Alef Final Form: FE8E". I have put the 3 Arabic characters in their corrected glyphs and mappings, but when they join or connected to each other, the new appearance should become as in the attachment. :(
Please help me to solve this problem, God rewards you for this. :)
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

You need to add OpenType feature called glyph substitution to your font. FontCreator doesn't support that yet, so you will have to use a third-party program. I don't understand how Arabic fonts should be designed, but I suspect you need to add aTerminal Forms feature for this.

Adding OpenType Features
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asar
Posts: 28
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2010 1:23 am
Location: City: Kuantan, state: Pahang, country: Malaysia

Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by asar »

Dear friends, thank you a lot for the explanation, but I dont understand it- its too complicated for me (I am not a programmer).
Anyway, I think it must be a way in the Font Creator to solve the problem. Just have a look at the Arabic letter Lam 0644 (it also Arabic letter Lam isolated form), when it connects with Arabic letter Alef final form; it appears different from the original glyph- it appears as in my attachment.
Anyway, again thanks a lot, God rewards you all, amēn.
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vanisaac
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Location: Washington State, USA

Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by vanisaac »

So it looks like Uniscribe is doing the Lem+alef ligature substitution for you. The way to inhibit ligature formation is with the Zero Width Non Joiner character (U+200C). I don't know why you are using the U+FEDF / U+FE8E forms, though. Those are only included in the standard for back compatibility with old Arabic code pages. You should use Arabic Lam (U+0644) + Fatha (U+064E) + ZWNJ (U+200C) + Arabic Alef (U+0627). This will get you into NFKD(and probably NFKC) form - which are the ones most likely to work with all of the search functions and keyboards out there. If you don't know how to make a ZWNJ, just go to Word Pad in windows, type in 200c, highlight only those four characters, and press alt+x. Select and copy/paste as you please. You can actually use that trick to just do the whole series as well. Just type the 0644064e200c0627, select each group of four and alt+x to convert the codes into Unicode characters. Then you'll have your whole weird non-ligature all in one!
vanisaac
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Location: Washington State, USA

Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by vanisaac »

I forgot that the Arabic ligature model is screwed up because of back-compatibility issues. That should be ZWJ (U+200d), not ZWNJ. Ligatures are default rendering, ZWJ is for connected, but unligated forms, and ZWNJ is for unconnected forms. My bad. So that sequence should be 0644064e200d0627, resulting in لَ‍ا .
asar
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Location: City: Kuantan, state: Pahang, country: Malaysia

Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by asar »

Afternoon Vanisaac and thank you very much for your prompt reply.
I am very sorry for this late reply, I just came back from my holidays- Eid celebration. Ok, your explanation sounds well to me, but what is the right mapping in the font. I cannot put all the mappings (0644064e200d0627) for a character? I have came out with a new form for the weird character (Laam + Fatha + Alef) and I have also put its mapping in Private Use Area: E066, but still not working- it still appears as the default form. Anyway, thanks for sharing your knowledge. :( :) :)

Psss... I have bought a new laptop and would like to transfer this Font Creator to the new one (I bought it by online and the activation was also by online), is it still possible? :?
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vanisaac
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Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by vanisaac »

asar wrote:Afternoon Vanisaac and thank you very much for your prompt reply.
I am very sorry for this late reply, I just came back from my holidays- Eid celebration. Ok, your explanation sounds well to me, but what is the right mapping in the font. I cannot put all the mappings (0644064e200d0627) for a character? I have came out with a new form for the weird character (Laam + Fatha + Alef) and I have also put its mapping in Private Use Area: E066, but still not working- it still appears as the default form. Anyway, thanks for sharing your knowledge. :( :) :)
Ah, the mapping in the font. In order to do this with your font, you need OpenType substitutions for the positional forms, and bind them to the <isol> (isolate forms), <init> (initial), <medi> (medial), and <fina> (final) features in the Arabic script. You need to have these OT features for pretty much any Arabic font to work correctly, at least on a Windows machine. I suggest adding the OpenType tables with VOLT from Microsoft, although you can do a search on this forum and find other ways of adding OpenType tables to your fonts. Most fonts will name the glyphs for the positional forms something like uni0644.isol, uni0644.init, uni0644.medi, and uni0644.fina, so it is easy to set up the substitutions.
Psss... I have bought a new laptop and would like to transfer this Font Creator to the new one (I bought it by online and the activation was also by online), is it still possible? :?
If you have a current license, you should be able to just download the program to your new laptop and enter the license code just like you did on your current computer. If it's an expired license, email a copy of your license to Erwin, and he'll send a link to the last version of FCP that your license covers, so you can install it on your current computer.
asar
Posts: 28
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2010 1:23 am
Location: City: Kuantan, state: Pahang, country: Malaysia

Re: Two Arabic characters connected together

Post by asar »

Huhhh... I think its complicated already- need to study more about the OpenType substitutions (just because of 1 character?). Anyway, does this has been included in the User Manual of Font Creator? By the way, about Microsoft VOLT- its very hard to learn, not user friendly (well I admit that Font Creator is much better) - I got the software but it does not help me - I think Microsoft VOLT is for a programmer, not suitable for a lay man like me.
Van, could I hire you for this, I really meant about this? Fyi, I have created my own font namely as "Asar", perhaps I just give you the font and from there you edit it? If it possible, could I have your email please (so I can send my font directly to you)? If this cannot, if you dont mind, could you show me step by step, please... I am very sorry for taking your time a lot. Thanks a lot
Asar Abd KarimTogether we make this temporary world a better place to live
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