Small circles should only appear below initial & medial forms of KASHMIRI YEH

[r12a]

This issue is applicable to Kashmiri.

Palatalisation is a frequent feature of Kashmiri words. It is represented using ؠ U+0620 LETTER KASHMIRI YEH after the consonant to be palatalised. Medial forms have a small circle beneath them. These changes follow the same pattern as ی U+06CC LETTER FARSI YEH, which has 2 dots below initial and medial forms, but no dots below final and isolate forms.

More:

• Orthography notes

The GAP

Although most nastaliq fonts add the small circles only below initial and medial forms, naskh style fonts used for Kashmiri text tend to put the circle below final and independent forms also, which is incorrect. This may be in part due to the Unicode Standard, which says

U+0620 LETTER KASHMIRI YEH is used in Kashmiri text to indicate that the preceding consonantal sound is palatalised. The letter has the form of a yeh with a diacritic small circle below. It has the YEH joining group, with the shapes shown in the fifth row of Table 9-10. However, when Kashmiri is written in the Nastaliq style, the final and isolated forms of kashmiri yeh usually appear as truncated yeh shapes (ؠ) without the diacritic ring.

This is not a browser issue, and will need to be fixed in fonts, and in the Unicode Standard. A key set of fonts to address are Noto fonts. Currently, the following Noto fonts show circles below each positional form: Naskh Arabic, Sans Arabic, Kufi Arabic, and the two UI fonts.

Priority

For Kashmiri users the impact is mitigated to an extent by nastaliq fonts doing the right thing; this is an issue for naskh font styles, which are not commonly used for Kashmiri text. Nontheless, they are used sometimes, particularly for educational or expository content, and in those circumstances not only is the rendering incorrect, but it can lead to authors trying to add circles where they are not needed. This is therefore marked as a Basic gap.

Tests

The relevant fonts need to be installed for the following to show results:

• Noto Naskh Arabic
  
• Noto Sans Arabic
  
• Noto Kufi Arabic
  

Action taken

Issue, Noto fonts

Outcomes

The Unicode Standard text was changed to the following, with bolding used here to emphasis changes:

U+0620 ARABIC LETTER KASHMIRI YEH is used in Kashmiri text to indicate that the preceding consonantal sound is palatalized. The letter has the form of a yeh with a diacritic small circle below in initial and medial forms, but its final and isolated forms appear as truncated yeh shapes (ؠ) without the diacritic ring. It has a joining group of its own, KASHMIRI YEH, with the shapes as shown in Table 9-10, as well as Table 9-7. (Prior to Version 16.0, the Unicode Standard had specified that when written in the Naskh style, the letter had different shapes than when written in Nastaliq style; that specification was erroneous.)
https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-9/#G37640 (6th paragraph)

[r12a]

The first comment in this issue contains text that will automatically appear in one or more gap-analysis documents as a subsection with the same title as this issue. Any edits made to that comment will be immediately available in the Editor's draft of the document. Proposals for changes or discussion of the content can be made by adding comments below this point.

Relevant gap analysis documents include:
Arabic script