At 23:00 11/7/2001, Arjun Aggarwal wrote:
>So can't somebody help me in doing the same for Devnagari in which around
>10 major languages are written.And in the same way as Arabic and Chinese
>the languages cannot be written without the use of half characters . They
>have to be represented as half characters only if the language is to be of
>any use in the way it is represented in Unicode.They cannot be left to be
>interpreted by any application programme on it's own.
>
>That is why you may not have seen any webpages or other applications
>written in Devnagari for computer use because the present form of
>representation of this script in Unicode is just not sufficient.
It is not true that the Unicode encoding of Devanagari is insufficient due
to the lack of half-forms*, and it is not true that we have not seen any
applications written in Devanagari for computer use. As has been explained
to you before, the Unicode encoding is based on the Indian national ISCII,
and it has been very successfully implemented in major application suites,
e.g. Microsoft Office, that ship millions of copies all over the world. I
can enter Hindi text on Windows 2000 in documents, spreadsheets and
databases made in any application that uses the Windows Uniscribe dll for
complex script rendering, including Internet Explorer for webpages (I don't
have any Hindi webpages online, but I have made tests of UTF-8 for
Devanagari). The only problem I have at the moment is that I'm limited to
one not very elegant font (Mangal, designed as a Hindi UI font for Windows
2000), but I personally know of at least a dozen font developers who are
working on Unicode OpenType fonts for Indic scripts -- not just Devanagari,
but also Bengali, Tamil, Gujerati and others. Many of these font developers
are Indians who clearly do not share your confusions about the utility of
Unicode for Indic scripts.
If you still do not understand how it is possible to provide correct
shaping for the Devanagari script using Unicode, please take a look at my
article on Windows Glyph Processing on the Microsoft Typography website:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm
The overview section about Uniscribe includes a detailed example of how
Unicode shaping rules are applied to a short piece of Devanagari text. Be
sure to read the footnote [9] for this section, which provides a
syllable-by-syllable analysis of OpenType Layout rendering for a long
Sanskrit word; as you will note, the 'Half Forms' feature is applied
exactly as needed to render this word in this particular font.
John Hudson
* The current Unicode Devanagari block _is_ insufficient for accurately
encoding many Sanskrit texts due to the lack of Vedic marks. Proposals have
been developed for adding Vedic marks to Unicode.
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
I see this guy named Typography in the shower one morning,
the lightning bolt of epiphany striking as he rubs the suds from
his eyes, 'That's It! I'll redefine myself - she'll have to notice me!'
Dean Allen, www.textism.com
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