From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2006 - 20:25:43 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> By 'base character' I meant the first consonant of the cluster in the
>> encoding sequence.
> Personnaly I exclude a dead RA (when it will be transformed to a repha
> form) as the significant base character for the graphical rendering, and
> the significant base character becomes the next consonnant,which comes
> leter in the consonnant cluster.
You've also got the dead NGA in some SE Asian scripts (Mon subfamily? -
certainly in Burmese and Lanna) that behaves similarly. However, easy
replaceability does depend on the character being first in the storage
order.
>> Reportedly almost every consonant or
>> conjunct in Marathi has a half-form, even though the half-form may look
>> like
>> the full form plus halant. (It can't be a halant, because the short
>> i-matra
>> precedes the half-form. :-)
> For a font, the full form + halant is not the half-form, it's just the way
> to transcript the dead letter, because these letters don't have half-form.
> So if we speakabout making a font that works for Marathi, it
> reallyissimpler to consider that it has no half form. I don't know what a
> sequence with such dead letter + virama + ZWNJ can encode distinctly
> compared to dead letter+virama, given that the virama will become a halant
> on the full letter in both cases.
Some of us find it much easier to think of virama + ZWNJ forcing there to be
two aksharas rather than one. Attaching the preposed vowel to the first one
then seems bizarre. Does ZWNJ prevent it being attached to the first vowel?
Unfortunately, the fall-back rules seem to prevent there being a clear way
of the author specifying that the preposed vowel attaches to the part with
the halant. I have no idea whether the position of the preposed vowel
distinguishes words.
Richard.
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