Unicode has many "control characters" that only control text behaviour and shouldn't be rendered visually in the text, such as Bidi_Control and Join_Control chars (see http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/PropList.txt and http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html) Currently, ConTeXt handles ZWJ and ZWNJ, but other characters get rendered if the font has glyphs for them or make no effect at all if the font has no glyphs for them. I think that the optimum behaviour is to make those characters affect text formatting while not visually rendered whether the font has glyphs for them or not. It might be also useful if we can enable rendering those characters manually, for drafts and such. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team