[HarfBuzz] The canonical ordering of hamza marks

[Khaled Hosny]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 02:26:15PM -0700, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
> 
> > Furthermore, <alef,quranic madda> ≠ <alef with madda above>
> >
> 
> Why?

Because every Mushaf printed in Egypt (and most of the Arabic world)
since 1919[1] has a note at the end of Madda description stating that “…
and this mark should not be used to indicate an omitted Alef after[sic]
a written Alef, as in آمنوا, that were mistakingly put in many
Mushafs …”, which to me is a very frank indication that the two marks
are not the same thing.

Also a vowel mark (which the Quranic Madda is) should not “blend” with
its base letter, the same way that U+06C7 is not canonically equivalent
to <U+0648,U+064F> etc.

Regards,
Khaled

1. The date of first Mushaf printed by Al-Azhar where most of the
Quranic annotation marks were formalized and standardized.