Word heaping

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Word heaping is a technique used for text justification in Arabic script, in which one word can be placed over another to save space on the line. [1]

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Heap ligatures in Unicode

Arabic Presentation Forms-A has a few characters defined as "word ligatures" for terms frequently used in formulaic expressions in Arabic. A few example ligatures that feature heaping are shown below: [n 1]

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Dagger alif

The dagger alif or superscript alif is written as a short vertical stroke on top of an Arabic letter. It indicates a long sound where alif is normally not written, e.g. هَٰذَا hādhā or رَحْمَٰن raḥmān. The dagger alif occurs in only a few modern words, but these include some common ones; it is seldom written, however, even in fully vocalised texts, except in the Qur'an. As Wright notes "[alif] was at first more rarely marked than the other long vowels, and hence it happens that, at a later period, after the invention of the vowel-points, it was indicated in some very common words merely by a fatḥa [i.e. the dagger alif.]" Most keyboards do not have dagger alif. The word ﷲ is usually produced automatically by entering "alif lām lām hāʾ". The word consists of alif + ligature of doubled lām with a shadda and a dagger alif above lām.

References

  1. Mohamed Jamal Eddine Benatia, Mohamed Elyaakoubi and Azzeddine Lazrek (2006). "TUGboat, Volume 27 (2006), No. 2—Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Meeting: Arabic text justification" (PDF). TeX Users Group.

Notes

  1. May not sometimes render properly without font support

See also