Character shaping

Character shaping occurs when the shape of a character is dependent on its position in a line of text. In some languages, such as Arabic, characters have different shapes depending on their position in a string and on the surrounding characters.

The following characteristics determine character shaping in Arabic script:

• The written language has no equivalent to capital letters.
• The characters have different shapes, depending on their position in a string and on the surrounding characters.
• The written language is cursive. Most characters of a word are connected, as in English handwriting.
• Joined characters can form nonspacing characters. Additionally, a character can have a vowel or diacritic mark written over or under it.
• Characters can vary in length, resulting in an output of two coded shapes.