Arabic: Character Forms

 

Arabic includes four different presentation forms for each character, depending on whether the character is presented stand alone, or occupies the initial, final, or some other medial position in a word.  In all cases Nota Bene handles the generation of the proper form automatically.

 

However, Nota Bene lets you override the auto-generated form manually if necessary.  There are six special functions, in two general categories, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, that modify the character:

 

Group 1: Forced Forms
A  --  Render the character in its stand-alone form, regardless of context
I   --  Render the character as an initial form, regardless of context
F  --  Render the character as a final form, regardless of context
M --  Render the character as a medial form, regardless of context

 

Group 2:  Zero-Width Modifiers
N  --  Insert a zero-width non-joiner character, suppressing any natural joining
J  --  Insert a zero-width joining character, forcing joining even if it would otherwise not occur

 

The advantage of using the group 1 forced forms is that they give you the specified form directly, without you having to do any thinking at all.  The disadvantage is that (since these functions are native to Nota Bene, and have no Unicode equivalent), they (and the particular form of the character they produce in Nota Bene) may not convert correctly when converted to RTF Unicode.

 

The advantage of using the group 2 zero-width modifiers is that they should be able to be converted properly when writing out a file in RTF Unicode format.  However, they may sometimes require either additional steps and even, sometimes, a little more thought.  For example, if you want to make a medial character (as auto-rendered by Nota Bene) into a stand-alone version, you will need to insert a zero-width non-joiner both before and after the character, in a two-step process.

 

All six special characters are available in a number of different places:

 

•The compose key:  Press F6, then hold the Alt key, and press the shortcut letter (see above)
•On the Ctrl+Alt keyboard (press the shortcut letter above) in the 6 Nota Bene Arabic keyboards
•In the Character Inventory (Shift+Alt+F5, select Arabic, and then Miscellaneous Arabic)

 

Note that the presence of these special modifiers as "characters" in the inventory (they are not, of course, actual characters themselves, but only modify existing characters) lets you assign them to customized keyboards that you may choose to create.

 

In addition to automatic contextualization, Nota Bene also supports automatic generation of the required lam+alef ligature:

 

•Indeed, some of the default Arabic keyboard layouts shipped with Nota Bene may not even provide a means of entering the ligatured form directly (instead auto composing it as you type).
•Remember that you can always suppress an autogenerated ligature form by using one of the modifiers described immediately above
•No other ligatures (other than those composed of base + vowel/accent/modifier) are currently supported in this release of Arabic Lingua.  While such ligatures are an important part of high-quality Arabic typesetting, the required forms are simply missing from the standard Windows Unicode fonts.  Until they are widely available, including them would only be an exercise in frustration.

 

Finally, note that Nota Bene uses the tatweel character (in various widths) as necessary, especially to connect letters within a word when justifying.  Although some keyboards may lack direct access to this character, you can always insert it manually when needed using F6, then Alt+T.

 

 

See also:

Arabic Import/Export

Arabic