From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Tue Jan 04 2005 - 14:03:28 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> >> > I can easily find fonts for the Myanmar/Pali script,
> >> > (none of them mapped to Unicode),
> >>
> >> Look after MyaZedi (http://www.myazedi.com/downloads/).
>
> The Myazedi website is now... empty: a page with graphics and
> no active links...
... which is the very reason why I gave you the link directly to the
download page.
> And Pali characters are not present in it!
What are "Pali characters"?
> I know that some new characters are in the Unicode character
> pipe. But the list of conjuncts is documented nowhere.
What are you referring to?
I see nothing in http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
I only know about N2827 (http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2827.pdf),
but I was guessing it was not considered for approval. And anyway they are
not new characters in any sense, the set of eleven glides as combination of
4 medials is well known for years.
> Also the rules related to the usage of "kinzi"
Are the words of TUS 10.3 unclear here?
Also is http://www.mcf.org.mm/unicode/rendering/kinzi.htm ambiguous?
> or how this impacts the general encoding of other "normal"
> clusters (with or without the kinzi).
How can you feel it is a problem?
> If there are some other similar variants of kinzi in
> other Myanmar-scrip-based languages,
I guess you mean, some kind of "repha", don't you?
> it would be interesting to know that early,
Well, Myanmar is encoded in Unicode/10646 for 10 years now. So "early" here
is a /very/ relative concept.
> Unicode just says
> for now that this "kinzi" behavior is similar to the behavior of the
> Devanagari RA, but my experience with it shows that it is
> much more tricky to handle.
In what way? I did not experience such problems, but I may easily miss
something here.
OTOH I believe Nagari RA is _very_ tricky. So "much more tricky", « c'est
plus blanc que blanc, c'est nouveau comme couleur, cela vient de sortir...
;-) » [ For non-Frenchies: it is from "La publicité", well-known piece of a
French humorist named Coluche; it was a satyre of French ads for washing
powder, it translates to "it is more white than white; that is a new colour,
it just comes out". ]
> The complexity of the Myanmar script is not enough documented
> by Unicode,
What do you mean here?
Oriya is about as complex as Myanmar is, although the complexities are not
in the same things. Yet Myanmar got 4 pages, and Oriya about 12 lines (I am
too lazy to check the actual figures). And we can find many such examples.
Of course one can wrote a treaty about each one of the complex scripts, with
list of conjuncts, dictionnaries, etc. However, doing so will result in a
Unicode Standard which would count 10,000+ pages, and it would then be
impossible to achieve the minimum level of overall quality.
I agree with you that they are shortcuts in the Myanmar description,
particularly about "pathologic" sequences. But this subject is not specific
to Myanmar, it is common to all Indic scripts; and there is already a group
working on that (and similar issues).
> and unfortunately, the relevant and accurante resources about
> it are quite hard to find on the web
I do not believe scholars should _only_ consult the web. In fact, I consider
it would be ill-advised to do so; and furthermore such behaviour might lead
to bashes from the native scholars (and I already took my quota for it.)
> (there may exist sources in local libraries,
Perhaps public libraries... ?
> free communications with MyanMar, the country, are too
> severely controled by its government,
This is probably off topic here, but I fail to see how control of
communications could allow a government to prevent the script of its
citizens to become known by Westerners (or Easterners for that matter).
As far as I know, PRC also is using some form of control of the
communications, and I believe PRC scholars are very influent in the IRG, and
hence very influent in Unicode.
Antoine
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