Talk:Syriac (Unicode block)

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Text and/or other creative content from this version of List of Unicode characters was copied or moved into Syriac (Unicode block) with this edit on 18:06, 6 February 2015. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Unicode Rendering[edit]

Anyone else having a problem with Syriac rendering? Is it my browser, or some wikimedia thing? It's been bothering me. --Monochrome_Monitor 22:27, 3 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, what problems are you having? Syriac has been in Unicode for many years, and should work out of the box on most systems. BabelStone (talk) 22:32, 3 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's all boxes with question marks. I'm using Firefox, if that makes a difference. Arabic, Hebrew, and Phonecian render correctly. --Monochrome_Monitor 00:15, 4 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

When I enter the Unicode number directly into the character viewer, it recognizes what the character is named, but displays an empty box. I probably need to download something. --Monochrome_Monitor 00:20, 4 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, you probably just need a font with Syriac coverage. I try to keep an up-to-date copy of unifont on my machine for viewing this kind of stuff, but a google search will probably give you a selection of fonts with Syriac coverage, not to mention a few Syriac specific fonts, as well. Van Isaac_WS^cont 22:27, 4 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks man. I can read hebrew and a bit of Arabic so I thought the Aramaic alphabet would be fun to look at. I figured out the problem though, apparently Mac OS doesn't have Syriac support, so I needed to download a font. Booo--Monochrome_Monitor 03:26, 5 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Different forms of the Syriac alphabet[edit]

The article (currently) states that the Syriac Unicode block contains "characters for all forms of the Syriac alphabet, including the Estrangela, Serto, Eastern Syriac, and the Christian Palestinian Aramaic variants".
Reading this I expected each letter to have several different code points, one for each form of the alphabet, but it seems there's only one code point for each letter.

Does this mean rendering different forms of the alphabet is achieved by different fonts, rather than by different code points?
And if so, should this maybe be explained more explicitly in the article?
2A02:8109:A380:B58:A4E4:C057:27A5:FB1F (talk) 22:49, 3 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the different styles are achieved at a font level. Unfortunately the Syriac section of The Unicode Standard (chapter 9.3) doesn't explicitly say this so I'm not sure what the proper reference is to back it up. Feel free to update the article to make this clearer. I'd steer away from the term forms though because it might be confused with initial/medial/final forms as Syriac is a joining script. DRMcCreedy (talk) 23:43, 3 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]