Re: Why are the double-part Indic vowel signs decomposable

From: Ed Trager (ed.trager@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 03 2009 - 12:57:50 CDT

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    Hi, Shriramana,

    What about the case of preparing a primary school reader or text book
    where one wants to be able to show how the decomposed parts are fit
    together to write words on paper? For example, what if I want an
    illustration using the following string:

    U0BCA U002B U0B95 U002B U0BBE U003D U003E U0B95 U0BCA

    ெ+க+ா => கொ

    With this line of reasoning, one would want to be able to decompose
    multi-part vowel signs for all Indic and Indic-derived scripts bearing
    such orthographies.

    - Ed

    On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Shriramana Sharma<samjnaa@gmail.com> wrote:
    > On 2009-Sep-03 20:24, Eric Muller wrote:
    >>>
    >>> Yet "compatibility decompositions" are provided for all the two-part
    >>> Indic vowels.
    >>
    >> Those are vowel *signs*.
    >
    > All right, vowel signs. That still does not answer the question of why one
    > is allowed two different ways to encode the same word. In Latin,
    >
    > LATIN SMALL LETTER A + COMBINING MACRON
    > LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH MACRON
    >
    > has some meaning to it and both mean the same.
    >
    > OTOH
    >
    > TAMIL LETTER KA + TAMIL VOWEL SIGN E + TAMIL VOWEL SIGN AA
    >
    > has no meaning to it and certainly not the meaning of
    >
    > TAMIL LETTER KA + TAMIL VOWEL SIGN O
    >
    > I know that Unicode is not concerned with the encoding sequences being
    > "meaningful", but still, would it be wrong or at least frowned upon if I,
    > while encoding a new Indic script, refrained from decomposing these two-part
    > vowel signs?
    >
    > --
    > Shriramana Sharma
    >
    >

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