Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

[abrahamgross at disroot.org]

Unicode encodes characters that other character sets have even though it normally wouldn't. So if I find a character set with a folded lamed they'd add it?

Here are 2 character sets with a folded lamed:
https://i.imgur.com/iq8awBe.jpg – an אלף בינה with the standing and folded lameds as separate letters.
https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb15-3/tb44haralambous-hebrew.pdf#page=12 – A TeX typesetting module with the standing and folded lameds as separate characters for fine-grain control when the automatic system doesn't work.

2020年6月7日 10:27, "Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> On 6/7/20 7:46 AM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> 
> I agree.  Sorry, pretty typography is nice and everything, but if bent LAMED is anything, it's at
> best a presentation form (and even that is a hard sell.)  You show ANYONE a word spelled with any
> combination of bent and straight LAMEDs and ask how it's spelled, they'll just say "LAMED" for each
> one.  Unicode encodes different *characters*, symbols that have a different *meaning* in text, not
> things that happen to look different.  A U+05BA HOLAM HASER FOR VAV means not just "a dot like
> U+05B9 only shifted over a little," it means that there is something *different* going on: VAV plus
> HOLAM usually means one thing (a VAV as mater lectionis for an /o/ vowel), this is a consonantal
> VAV followed by a vowel.  In spelling it out, you could call one a holam malé, but not the other. 
> A QAMATS QATAN is not just a qamats that looks a little different, it is a grammatically distinct
> character, and moreover one that cannot be deduced algorithmically by looking at the letters around
> it.  What you're talking about is a LAMED and a LAMED.  They are two *glyphs* for the same
> character, and Unicode doesn't encode glyphs (anymore?)
> 
> ~mark