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Arabic Presentation Forms-A is a Unicode block 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 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 It has been agreed no further presentation forms will be encoded; though the block still sees further encodings including a contiguous range of 32 noncharacters.
Block
History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Arabic Presentation Forms-A block:
Version Count L2 ID WG2 ID Document 1.1 U+FB50..FBB1, FBD3..FD3F, FD50..FD8F, FD92..FDC7, FDF0..FDFB 593 (to be determined) N5155 3.1 U+FDD0..FDEF 32 N2277 N2253 3.2 U+FDFC 1 N2373 N2403 4.0 U+FDFD 1 doc) doc) doc) N2567 N2568 doc) 6.0 U+FBB2..FBC1 16 doc) N3460R doc) N3606 doc) 14.0 U+FBC2 1 N5142 U+FD40..FD4B, FDFE..FDFF 14 U+FD4C..FD4D 2 U+FD4E..FD4F 2 U+FDCF 1 17.0 U+FBC3..FBD2, FD91 17 U+FD90, FDC8..FDCE 8
References