Bug 10452

Created attachment 9341 [details]
Ligature of Alif and Lam with and without "v"

The ligatures on the left should resemble those on the right, only with an additional "v" in the middle of the connected letters.

Created attachment 9342 [details]
Example for a correct ligature

This is an example for a correct ligature between Lam with v and Alif. It is the headline of the "Hawlati" newspaper. The blue word is "Hawlati".

I'm still wondering about the best way to implement this.

The easy way would just add a "lam with v" + "alif" ligature, but that way there won't be a ligature with "alif with hamza" or "alif with madda". Now I wonder of course if those combinations ever occur...

The difficult way doens't have that issue (and would be easily extendable for other variants like that) but yeah, it's more difficult :-)

I'll look at other fonts to compare. SIL fonts have it the difficult way, but don't know about other ones.

"Alif with hamza" and "alif with madda" are not so necessary for Kurdish, but crucial for Arabic. You can't throw them out of the font. 

Tahoma has the ligature, but I don't know how they do it. You can try at http://ku.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%87%D8%A7%D9%88%DA%B5%D8%A7%D8%AA%DB%8C , it will show the page in Tahoma if no DejaVu is installed.

I have to ask someone who knows Arabic about the ligature. Lam + Alif with madda seems unlikely to me, but if it's in the font it probably exists.

And I forgot to say, the above mentioned page is displayed correctly only in internet explorer, due to a bug in Firefox - or is this not even a bug? Maybe a problem of fonts?

Did you have a look at other fonts? What was the result?

Created attachment 15558 [details]
Comparision of different fonts, including Scheherazade

I have just seen that Scheherazade now also has the correct ligature, so it is somehow be possible. Please check whether you can also include it into DejaVu Sans.