RE: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup (was Re: Coloured diacritics (Was: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup))

From: Peter Jacobi (peter_jacobi@gmx.net)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 16:56:47 EST

  • Next message: Mete Kural: "RE: Coloured diacritics (Was: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup)"

    Dear Peter Constable, Peter Kirk, All,

    "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
    > SIL's Graphite definitely *will* permit exactly what you want to do
    > (assuming the font is properly designed). [...]

    Thanks for this clarification. Having tried SIL WorldPad with Tamil
    Graphite
    font, and not getting the desired results, I was under the impression that
    Graphite doesn't handle it. It seems I have to do some programming
    against the Graphite lib to get a better understanding.

    Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> wrote:
    > I thought this had been made clear. This is not a matter for Unicode as
    > Unicode does not define character styles. It is not a matter for legacy
    > encodings either unless they define character styles. It is a matter for
    > higher level protocols. You need to address your comments to those who
    > define them.

    "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
    > There is nothing about encoding of Tamil in Unicode that prevents
    > styling of individual characters. This is not a Unicode problem, as (at
    > least some) others have said.

    Unicode doesn't prevent styling, of course. But having 'logical' order
    instead of 'visual' makes it a hard task for the application and the
    renderer.
    This is witnessed by the thin-spread support for this.

    'Logical order' makes a lot sense for heavily conjunct forming, 2-D
    compositing
    scripts. It is not such a perfect match for Tamil, which is essentially 1-D
    and
    has a well-defined visual order of characters. But excuse my lamenting, I'm
    not
    into utopian and ill-advised projects of re-doing all from scratch.

    Having an 'invisible consonant' to call for rendering of the vowel sign
    in isolation (and without the dotted circle), would also help the limited
    number of cases where the styled single character is needed - but in
    a rather hackish way.

    Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> wrote:
    > Unicode in fact makes deliberate provision for inserting markup within
    > combining character sequences by not forbidding defective combining
    > sequences. If particular markup protocols refuse to use this provision,
    > that is their problem.

    Agreed. I already conceded, that this was a most valuable lesson, I learned
    from this discussion.

    Best Regards,
    Peter Jacobi

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