Arabic Presentation Forms-B is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...

encoding spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and contextual letter forms. The special codepoint

ZWNBSP The word joiner (WJ) is a format character in Unicode used to indicate that word separation should not occur at a position, when using scripts such as Arabic that do not use explicit spacing. It is encoded since Unicode version 3.2 (released in ...

is also here, which is only meant for a

byte order mark The byte order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: * The byte order, or endianness, of th ...

(that may precede text, Arabic or not, or be absent). The block name in Unicode 1.0 was Basic Glyphs for Arabic Language; its characters were re-ordered in the process of merging with ISO 10646 in Unicode 1.0.1 and 1.1. The presentation forms are present only for compatibility with older standards, and are not currently needed for coding text.The Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0.0
(Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium, 2011. )
Chapter 8
/ref>

Block

History

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

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks