John Cowan recently said:
> Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com wrote:
>
> > Yes, I think it's likely. "f+ZWL+i" would be an explicitly required
> > ligature, "f+ZWNL+i" would be an explicitly forbidden ligarure, "f+i" would
> > be the programmers' favorite expression: "the default".
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
> > I don't understand the cursiveness example that Michael does above; what
> > other subtle reasons are there not to unify ZWL with ZWJ?
>
> Primarily that ZWJ and ZWNJ are essentially related to the idea of context-sensitive
> letterforms. They function as letters which deceive the shaping process.
> In the Arabic context, which is the paradigmatic one for these letters, the
> sequence letter+ZWJ deceives the renderer into believing that the letter
> is initial rather than isolated. Similarly, in Indic scripts the relevant
> forms are "normal", "normal with explicit virama" and "half form", and ZW[N]J
> deceives the normal rendering process here as well.
>
> ZWL, though, does not cause "f" to become "the f-form used with i following",
> nor "i" to become "the i-form used with f preceding", because there are
> no such things, and it would be intolerably ad hoc to make them so.
ZWL would request a ligation. The exact glyphs of the letters depends on the context.
ka + virama + ka stacks verticaly, but ka + virama and most other letters
stays horizontal and the first ka has a different glyph.
John Cowan also recently said:
> "James E. Agenbroad" wrote:
> > Could the Devanagari halant be used with Latin script, runes, etc.? This
> > is just a quick idea. Feel free to shoot it down.
> Two problems: virama has its own default glyph, and there seems to be
> no reason to use DEVANAGARI VIRAMA rather than one of the dozen or so
> other viramas. But this leads to an idea: that ZWL should be called
> SOFT VIRAMA, as it is used to ligate characters if possible, but has
> no rendering if ligation is impossible.
Virama implies killing an inherent vowel and is a script specific concept.
Ligatures are more general. The behaviour with Indic scripts needs to be
defined though.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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