Arabic Presentation Forms-B is a Unicode block encoding spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and contextual letter forms. The special codepoint ZWNBSP (zero width no-break space) is also here, which is only meant for a byte order mark (that may precede text, Arabic or not, or be absent).[note 1] The block name in Unicode 1.0 was Basic Glyphs for Arabic Language;[5] its characters were re-ordered in the process of merging with ISO 10646 in Unicode 1.0.1 and 1.1.[3]

The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text.[6]

Block

Arabic Presentation Forms-B[1][2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+FE7x ﹿ
U+FE8x
U+FE9x
U+FEAx
U+FEBx ﺿ
U+FECx
U+FEDx
U+FEEx
U+FEFx ZW
NBSP
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0
2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block:

References

  1. ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  3. ^ a b "Unicode 1.0.1 Addendum" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. 1992-11-03. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  4. ^ "Layout Controls" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0.0. The Unicode Consortium. p. 871.
  5. ^ "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium.
  6. ^ The Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0.0, (Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium, 2011. ISBN 978-1-936213-01-6), Chapter 8

Notes

  1. ^ As the name suggests, it was also used to prohibit line breaks at its position, but this usage was deprecated in Unicode 3.2.[4]
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