Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

abrahamgross at disroot.org abrahamgross at disroot.org
Tue Jun 2 22:18:35 CDT 2020


Why are there precomposed Hebrew characters in Unicode (Alphabetic Presentation Forms block)?

It says in the FAQ that “a substantial number of presentation forms were encoded in Unicode as compatibility characters, because legacy software or data included them.” (https://www.unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#PForms (https://www.unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#PForms))

I can't find any character set other than Unicode that has separate codepoints for all Hebrew letters with a dagesh/mapiq or any of the other precomposed letters other than the Yiddish ligatures. (ex: Code page 862, ISO/IEC 8859-8, Windows-1255)

Does anyone know where I can find the legacy software or character sets that had these presentation forms?

I also want to see the documents/proposals that got these characters accepted as part of Unicode. Does anyone know where I can find them? The closest I got was when I figured out the proposal to add HEBREW LETTER YOD WITH HIRIQ is in proposal N1364, but I can't find it in the document register…
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