From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu Jun 07 2007 - 13:58:55 CDT
Eric Muller wrote:
> I think that what Ambarish is telling is us is that what Unicode has
> described as RA_sub (see rule R6 in section 9.1), aka vattu in OpenType,
> should really considered as made of two parts, one stroke for RA and one
> stroke for a halant.
> In everything I have seen from Unicode and OpenType, vattu is viewed as
> an atomic object, and is graphically depicted as two connected strokes.
> Is it common to display a vattu as two disconnected strokes?
No, it is not common, although arguably the floating ^ rakar (vattu) might have originally
derived from a combination of a low-left-to-high-right 'RA_sub' stroke and
high-left-to-low-right halant stroke. Even in manuscript, though, there would have been
little impetus to write them separately: why lift the pen when you don't need to?
It looks to me like what the font in Jeroen's screenshot is doing is representing the
'RA_sub' in a way that will create merged rakar forms on-the-fly. When 'RA_sub' merges
with a letter, it is represented by a single stroke like this. These are most commonly
represented by precomposed glyphs, but it is possible to build them using a stroke like
this, although I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons. In this case, the
problem is that 'RA-sub" does not merge with all letters, and does not merge with
round-bottomed letters like ट. So I consider this diagonal stroke cutting through the
bottom of ट to be an incorrect representation of rakar in this context. It looks to me
like this font simply implements the rakar, by default, as a single stroke, which can be
positioned to create on-th-fly merged rakar forms with most letters but which looks
incorrect with certain letters.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
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