From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2006 - 11:16:35 CST
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
>> I did not say that. I said that this support was not complete, and not
>> working for all the announced Indic scripts that are configurable in IE
>> options. If there's noway to configure it correctly for these scripts,
>> these options should simply not be there.
>
> I disagree. Imperfect support may be better than no support.
Imperfect support that does not repect the language semantic and changes the expected visual order is worse than no support at all. It gives users the feeling that this is the correct way to enter text that won't interoperate correctly with other systems, because users tweak their input to match the expected output, but break the standard logical encoding order.
If there was no support at all, users wouldnothavetoworry about incorrectly encoded documents,and they could seek for some other third-party solutions.
I don't expect it to be perfect, as long as there's no risk of incorrect interpretation of the encoded and then rendered text (so if a font does not have repha forms, or subjoined letters, or if Indic diacritics that should be displayed above or below do display after the cluster, it will be OK as long asit renders half-forms, or if at least itrenders the base consonnant with an explicit virama without the normal half-form or ligatures).
But a font and rendering system that renders a left-matra on the right is clearly bogous and generates havoc... It should not be declared compliant, and so Unicode should define the minimum acceptable level for rendering systems (well, it does, but only in representative glyphs, which are not mandatory...so this is not enough.) Also, if a font lacks some characters, it MUST signal this absence (and must not display an invisible zero-width empty glyph) using a symbol that will be represented on the side of the current writing direction (so this symbol must be considered BiDi-neutral)...
The only exception is for non-spacing diacritics that may eventually be ignored (for example missing glyphs for Hebrew or Arabic points)
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