| Arabic Presentation Forms-A | |
|---|---|
| Range | U+FB50..U+FDFF (688 code points) |
| Plane | BMP |
| Scripts | Arabic (629 char.) Common (2 char.) |
| Major alphabets | Central Asian languages Pashto Persian Kurdish Sindhi Urdu |
| Symbol sets | contextual forms multi-letter and word ligatures |
| Assigned | 631 code points |
| Unused | 25 reserved code points 32 non-characters |
| Unicode version history | |
| 1.1 (1993) | 593 (+593) |
| 3.2 (2002) | 594 (+1) |
| 4.0 (2003) | 595 (+1) |
| 6.0 (2010) | 611 (+16) |
| 14.0 (2021) | 631 (+20) |
| Unicode documentation | |
| Code chart ∣ Web page | |
| Note: [1] [2] This range was initially part of the Private Use Area in Unicode 1.0.0, [3] and removed from it in Unicode 1.0.1. [4] | |
Arabic Presentation Forms-A is a Unicode block encoding contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. This block also allocates 32 noncharacters in Unicode, designed specifically for internal use.
The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards such as codepage 864 used in DOS, and are typically used in visual and not logical order. [5] It has been agreed no further presentation forms will be encoded; though the block still sees further encodings including a contiguous range of 32 noncharacters. [6]