On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 10:18:47PM +0100, "H. Özoguz" wrote:
It is my believe that Unicode has the wrong properties for Arabic standalone Hamza; in short you should just type a regular Hamza in the middle of the word and it will get positioned correctly. Placing a combining Hamza over a Tatweel to “fake” it is wrong IMO. So in Amiri you just type “بِءَايَٰتِ” and voilà, every thing is rendered correctly (the same is true for the small Alef).
Yes, that works. But the direct way works with Uhtmanic1HafsVer9:
\definefont[arabicamiri][file:amiri-regular.ttf*arabic at 15pt] \definefont[arabicuth][file:UthmanicHafs1Ver09.ttf*arabic at 17pt] \starttext \setupalign[r2l] \arabicamiri بِـَٔايَـٰتِ \blank \arabicuth بِـَٔايَـٰتِ \stoptext
I consider this wrong input so it is not supported by Amiri; the Hamza in بءايت is exactly the same Hamza in ءايت prefixed with ب, so the same Unicode character should be used in both, and Amiri goes to a great length to support this. Using a combing Hamza (which is a different Hamza) over a Tatweel is just a hack to emulate the same effect that you get “natively” with Amiri, I may support it in the future, but it is not a priority. If you read Arabic, the Amiri manual describes the proper Unicode sequences to input some of the Quranic marks that people get confused about because of the messiness of this area in Unicode (I should translate the manual to English, but time is always an issue).
To be honest, in Corel Draw UthmanicHafs is the perfect font for my purpose - at least in CorelDraw - e.g.: The ayat-numbers are printed as a unicode-symbol, not as numbers (perfect, because ConTeXt has problems with the direction with arabic numbers, they are mirrored in ConTeXt).
But it is only perfect in CorelDraw, in ConTeXt some things are not recognized correctly, as I mentioned. E.g. this one:
\definefont[arabicamiri][file:amiri-regular.ttf*arabic at 15pt] \definefont[arabicuth][file:UthmanicHafs1Ver09.ttf*arabic at 17pt] \starttext \setupalign[r2l] \arabicuth لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ ﴿٢﴾ \stoptext
If I put the same arabic into CorelDraw, it prints a nice Unicode-Symbol for the number - see the JPG I have attached here, screenshot from CorelDraw, but ConTeXt ignores the brackets and prints just a verys small number. There are some problems like this. Are they easy to fix, or is this problem deeply involved?
This seems like a font hack, the proper way to input the Aya mark is what Ondřej describes in his reply. Regards, Khaled