3.4. Additional Alternate Format Characters
The following format characters were introduced as a result of the merger with 10646:
- The symmetric swapping format characters can be used to control the glyphs used to represent characters such as "(".
- The character shaping selectors could be used to control the shaping behavior of the Arabic compatibility characters.
- The numeric shape selectors codes could be used to override the normal shapes of the Western Digits.
However, the use of the character shaping selectors and digit shapes codes from ISO/IEC 10646-1 is strongly discouraged in Unicode. Instead, the appropriate character codes should be used. For example, if the Arabic digit forms are desired, then the explicit characters should be used, such as U+0660 ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT ZERO. Similarly, if contextual forms for Arabic characters are desired, then the nominal characters should be used, and not the presentation forms with the shaping selectors.