Uniscribe, Hebrew, Volt and PUA

[Pere]

These are theoretical questions related to my topic “Some lookups work in the Proofing Tool but not in the font”. If these questions were clear to me, maybe I could solve some problems I exposed in the other topic.

1. Where can I find a complete description of the behavior of Uniscribe related to Hebrew characters? The Microsoft document “Developing OpenType Fonts for Hebrew Script, part 3: Shaping Engine”, seems to me that it is no complete. At least it does not explain the substitution of consonant + dagesh or mapiq by the composite characters U+FB2D to U+FB4A.

2. If with Volt we define a Simple (consonant) character as Mark, will Uniscribe allow this character to work as a Mark (to overstrike on any Hebrew consonant)?

3. If with Volt we define Private Use Area characters as Marks, will they be allowed to work as Marks (to overstrike on any Hebrew consonant and to be positioned to any Base character and to other Marks)?

4. If with Volt we assign Private Use Area characters to the Hebrew script, will these characters work rightly Right to Left?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

[tiro_hudson]

2&3. No. Uniscribe makes assumptions based on underlying character codes about what constitutes Hebrew characters and, hence, which are handled by the Hebrew shaping engine. PUA codepoints are not recognised as being Hebrew characters, so are not processed by the Hebrew shaping engine.

4. No. PUA characters all have presumed LTR directionality. In order for a PUA character to be handled as RTL, custom software has to be used that recognises that particular PUA character and knows what to do with it. PUA seldom works with standard software except in very simple circumstances.

[Pere]

Thank you very much for your answers. This makes everything much clearer for my work.

Being this so, it will be difficult to prepare a good Babylonian vocalization until we have the appropriate Unicode code points; in the meanwhile I will try to make at least an acceptable font.

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