windowsunicodetruetypeopentypeuniscribe

Arabic letter noon ghunna incorrectly displayed with a dot


Background

The Arabic letter noon ghunna (ں) is displayed incorrectly on my Windows 10 PC (in Chrome, Edge, Notepad and Word). The sequence ALEF, NOON GHUNNA, ALEF is displayed as:

ana

The same sequence is displayed correctly on my Android phone without the dot:

ana

For completeness, the actual unicode string (for copy/paste purposes) is:

اںا

There has been some controversy regarding this letter (L2-12/381) which has settled by now as seen from the Unicode Standard which states (since version 7 and up to the current 11):

Rendering systems should display U+06BA as a dual-joining letter, with all four contextual forms shown dotless, regardless of the language of the text.

But the dot appears in word-initial (ںا) and mid-word (اںا) positions. Final (اں) and isolated (ں) forms are fine.

Question

Now my question is, how can this be fixed, other than by waiting for Microsoft to fix it? I want to understand where the problem lies. Is it in the Uniscribe library, or is it down to the font being used? Can it be fixed by using a specifically crafted TrueType/OpenType font?


Solution

  • This turned out to be a font problem. Quite a few fonts on fonts.google.com show this letter correctly: