Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Cursive Joining Behavior

In some writing systems , the shape of a character varies depending on its position in the word. For instance, in Arabic, a character used at the beginning of a word looks completely different when it is used as the last character of a word. Generally, this joining behavior is handled within the software, but there are Unicode characters that give precise control over joining behavior. They have zero width and are placed between characters purely to specify whether the neighboring characters should join.

HTML 4.01 provides mnemonic character entities for both these characters, as shown in Table 6-3.

Table 6-3. Unicode characters for joining behavior

Entity	Numeric	Name	Description
‌	‌	zero-width non-joiner	Prevents joining of characters that would otherwise be joined.
‍	‍	zero-width joiner	Joins characters that would otherwise not be joined.