At 03:14 11/28/2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>Ken's and my discussion is a sort of slow-motion analysis of what goes on
>while typing text. We used a short word just in order to keep the example
>short. But feel free to apply the same concepts to cases such as
>"Bhagavadgitopanishad"
Or prajnyenaatmanaasmaallokaadutkramyamusminsvarge !
Marco, my comment was tangential to the overall discussion, and wasn't
intended to divert your 'slow-motion' and very interesting analysis.
>And Indian users too shouldn't be forced to process strings of *abstract*
>characters into their heads!
Agreed. But they should not necessarily be forced to process strings of
glyph either. The idea behind contemporary encoding and keyboard
implementations for Indic scripts is that input should be phonetic. This
has been the norm for Indian publishing, albeit with some differences from
the ISCII/Unicode approach (e.g. non-phonetic entry of I matra before
consonant/conjunct), since Linotype introduced phonetic keying in the
1970s. I wonder if some complaints from users like Mr Aggarwal stem from
the fact that phonetic keyboarding, while the norm for the Indian
publishing and typesetting industries, was not the norm for typewriters?
>What I found is that, in many cases, what happens on the screen after
>pressing a key is puzzling, unless one has a firm understanding of the
>Unicode character/glyph model, and continuously thinks at this model while
>typing.
I don't think it is necessary at all to continuously think about the
character/glyph model when typing. Most of the time, all you have to do is
type the phonetic representation of the words, and let the shaping engine
and font get on with the job of displaying it properly. It is only if you
need to step back into what has already been rendered that you need to have
some understanding of how that rendering has taken place. The lesson: don't
make mistakes when typing complex scripts :)
Seriously, though, I am interested in your idea about a kind of editing
level of rendering. This would be an implementation issue though, not an
encoding issue, right?
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
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