Arabic Presentation Forms-A is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes ( code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

encoding contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. This block also allocates 32 noncharacters in Unicode, designed specifically for internal use. The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards such as

codepage 864 Code page 864 (CCSID 864) (also known as CP 864, IBM 00864) is a code page used to write Arabic in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. CCSID 17248 is the euro currency update of code page/CCSID 864. The euro sign was assigned to the pre ...

used in DOS, and are typically used in visual and not logical order.The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0.0
(Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium, 2011. )
Chapter 8
/ref> It has been agreed no further presentation forms will be encoded; a contiguous range of 32 noncharacters have been allocated here, and further encodings serve only as fillers.

Block

History

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

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks