From: Keyur Shroff (keyur_shroff@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jan 29 2003 - 09:29:09 EST
--- Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it> wrote:
> Why not representing INV with a double ZWJ? E.g.:
>
> ISCII Unicode
> KA halant INV KA virama ZWJ ZWJ
> RA halant INV RA virama ZWJ ZWJ (i.e., repha)
> INV halant RA ZWJ ZWJ virama RA (RAsub)
>
> This has the advantage that the most common sequences will work OK also
> on
> old display engines implemented *before* the double-ZWJ convention is
> introduced.
>
> E.g., sequence "KA virama ZWJ ZWJ" works well also on an old engine, for
> the
> simple reason that the first ZWJ is enough to do the work, and the
> second ZWJ is invisible.
>
> Of course, an old engine will still display a <RA[eyelash]> for <RA
> virama
> ZWJ ZWJ>, but that is not worse than displaying <RA+virama> followed by a
> white box, which is what would happen with your new INV character.
Certainly. This looks more promising because even RAsub has two alternate
forms. One form is used with consonants KA, KHA, GHA, etc and the other
form is used with consonants TTA, TTHA, DDA, DDHA, etc. With your ZWJ based
scheme we can insert as many ZWJ as we wish to produce all possible
alternate forms!
But sometimes a user may want visual representation of these symbols in two
different ways: with dotted circle and without dotted circle. Example of
this could be RAsup on top of dotted circle and RAsup on top of space
character. Current use of space character to eliminate dotted circle is
really painful and may create problems in determining language and syllable
boundaries. The main problem with space character is that unlike
ZWJ/ZWNJ/Dotted Circle, it falls within the range of other important script
"Latin". Finally it may affect all important text processing which uses
Unicode characters to find language boundaries. Use of INV character in one
shot can solve all these problems. We can put it in "consonant" class which
can help text processing applications. Moreover, it will be difficult for
all possible to provide upward compatibility all the time even though it is
desirable. Implementation of Unicode will need to be upgraded with every
introduction of new glyphs or rules. Otherwise applications have to
explicitly declare the version of Unicode used in implementation.
- Keyur
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