Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 23:02:44 -0400
"Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> I don't know of any font machinery that can actually change things
> based on what's present on the previous *line*; that may not be
> supported. But you can bet that such a thing won't be reason enough
> to encode a new character.

And that leads to a problem that would not be solved by the encoding of
a new character.  If the position of line breaks may change, or the
text may be reset in a font with different relative character widths,
then which lamedhs are bent would change.

Arguably, the right place for standardisation is probably OpenType and
AAT features - and it might even be addressed already.

Richard.