Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

[jk at koremail.com]

On 2020-06-10 07:31, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 20:53:31 +0100
> Michael Everson via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
>> Doesn’t it matter _why_ they are bent?
>> 
>> > On 8 Jun 2020, at 22:02, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode
>> > <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Down to one sentence: until you can talk about which LAMEDs in the
>> > Torah are bent and which are straight, I would expect this to be a
>> > non-starter.
> 
> Yes, it does.  It seems that they are bent so that they don't clash
> with the line above.  Changing the line breaks or even changing the
> relative widths of the characters will change which ones get bent.
> Being bent is an attribute of glyphs in laid out text, rather than an
> attribute of characters in a sequence of characters.
> 
> That is why mention of ODT files is relevant.  I'm not sure what one
> has to do to stop an ODT file reflowing.  I suspect one may have to
> freeze a lot of the rendering chain to stop reflowing.
> 
> Richard.

If whether or not the lamed is bent depends on the line above then 
clearly not a suitable candidate for encoding.

John K