At 00:22 11/1/2001, Arjun Aggarwal wrote:
>The Unicode character set in it's current form does not support Devnagari
>well.It has no half characters for the Devnagari script.
>It is just like not having e a d f in the roman(latin) script.
>
>This particular aspect renders it useless to be used by anyone including
>programmers.
Please read the section of the Unicode Standard regarding shaping of Indic
scripts in general and Devanagari in particular. Half-forms do not need to
be encoded because they are handled at the glyph processing level, rather
than at the character level. So, for example, the Unicode character that is
used to encode the consonant 'ga' is rendered appropriately as a full-form,
half-form or as part of a conjunct ligature depending on the context and
the glyphs and layout features available in a particular font. This glyph
shaping is handled by intelligent fonts, working with complex script
engines at the system or application level. These fonts contain
substitution and positioning lookups that render the correct forms and
position diacritic marks correctly; the best known formats are OpenType
(MS, Adobe) and AAT (Apple, formerly known as GX).
The full-form glyphs that are used to represent consonant characters in the
Unicode charts are simpy representative of the abstract character and do
not imply that this specific form only is encoded.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
I see this guy named Typography in the shower one morning,
the lightning bolt of epiphany striking as he rubs the suds from
his eyes, 'That's It! I'll redefine myself - she'll have to notice me!'
Dean Allen, www.textism.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Nov 01 2001 - 05:28:07 EST