Urdu styles #63

I would like to discuss a few points about Urdu counter styles.

In Urdu lists, counters are usually followed by U+06D4 ARABIC FULL STOP. Some examples are below:

(from Lisani Mutale, by Gian Chand Jain)

(from Monthly Aankh Micholee, July 1986)

(from Imla Nama)

(from Afsane Ki Himayat Mein, by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi)

The document currently mentions in a note that urdu is identical to persian. It would be helpful to mention the 06D4 suffix in that note, too.

Even better: We can include the full counter style definition for Urdu. Now that this document is mentioned in the spec (and web browsers are soon expected to include these counter styles by default), an urdu counter style with the common appropriate suffix that CSS authors can easily use would be nice.

I noticed in a recent commit that initial definitions for two Urdu styles, urdu-alphabetic and urdu-abjad, were added.

CDAC's description of urdu-alphabetic being an unlimited style with characters getting doubled after exhaustion is interesting. I asked on an Urdu forum if anybody has seen its examples, but we haven't been able to find any yet (I would love to see one!)

A counter style for urdu-abjad will be beneficial: We needed it for the content of Imla Nama, and at that time we rolled our own definition (which is identical to what is added in that commit). However, in the aforementioned thread on the Urdu forum, a friend shared a book (about Punjabi poetry, but with extensive commentary and footnotes in Urdu), which uses two different Abjad orderings:

• For the page numbers of the book's front matter, it uses یا and یب and یج for 11, 12, 13 (this is also being discussed in Correction to the persian-alphabetic counter style #23).
• In the preface, when listing the sources used to compile the book, it uses the "usual" ordering of ک and ل and م for 11, 12, 13.

I have no idea why two different orderings were used, but I thought that it would be an interesting example to share. (In contrast, another Urdu poetry book also uses Abjad numerals for its front matter pages, but employs ک and ل and م for 11, 12, 13.)