If needed, the short vowels (there are only 3 in Arabic) are represented as shown on the lower line of the slide. Note that the small circle diacritic indicates NO intervening vowel. (Sequences of code points in Arabic and Hebrew on this and following slides will be shown in left to right order, to emphasise that the underlying order is logical.)

These short vowels are separate combining characters in the text stream that are displayed in the same two-dimensional visual space with the base character. Combining characters do not generally appear without a base character.