Arabic Presentation Forms-B

Arabic Presentation Forms-B is a Unicode block encoding spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and contextual letter forms. The special codepoint ZWNBSP (zero width no-break space) is also here, which is only meant for a byte order mark (that may precede text, Arabic or not, or be absent).[note 1] The block name in Unicode 1.0 was Basic Glyphs for Arabic Language;[5] its characters were re-ordered in the process of merging with ISO 10646 in Unicode 1.0.1 and 1.1.[3]

Arabic Presentation Forms-B
RangeU+FE70..U+FEFF
(144 code points)
PlaneBMP
ScriptsArabic (140 char.)
Common (1 char.)
Symbol setscontextual and isolate forms of Arabic letters and points
Assigned141 code points
Unused3 reserved code points
Unicode version history
1.0.0 (1991)140 (+140)
3.2 (2002)141 (+1)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [1][2]
The characters in this block were re-ordered in Unicode 1.0.1, in the process of merging with ISO/IEC 10646.[3]

The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text.[6]

Block

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Arabic Presentation Forms-B[1][2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+FE7x ﹿ
U+FE8x
U+FE9x
U+FEAx
U+FEBx ﺿ
U+FECx
U+FEDx
U+FEEx
U+FEFx ZW
NBSP
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0
2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

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The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Arabic Presentation Forms-B block:

References

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  1. ^ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  2. ^ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2023-07-26.
  3. ^ a b "Unicode 1.0.1 Addendum" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. 1992-11-03. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  4. ^ "Layout Controls" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0.0. The Unicode Consortium. p. 871.
  5. ^ "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium.
  6. ^ The Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0.0, (Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium, 2011. ISBN 978-1-936213-01-6), Chapter 8

Notes

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  1. ^ As the name suggests, it was also used to prohibit line breaks at its position, but this usage was deprecated in Unicode 3.2.[4]