From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Tue Aug 23 2005 - 17:36:18 CDT
In my openion, current Tamil Unicode is flawed only at implementation level.
It was implemented by those who misunderstood the technicalities and
Grammar.
However, it is appropriate, for the time being to dicuss the technical
merits of a would be proposal than discussing weather or not the NEW will be
encoded. I think it will be some time before we can expect an official
proposal on this.
I'm interested in discussing the technical merits.
Sinnathurai
----- Original Message -----
From: "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@apple.com>
To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 11:13 PM
Subject: Re: 28th IUC paper - Tamil Unicode New
> It's not at all likely to be approved. Unicode already has a Tamil
> encoding model which -- however flawed it may be in its theoretical
> grounding -- works and is supported on major platforms.
>
> As Ken notes, adding a second full Tamil encoding model to the standard
> would create a number of interoperability problems. Unless it can be
> shown to have significant *technical* advantages (meaning something other
> than it makes it possible to render Tamil without an advanced shaping
> engine), it's not likely to succeed.
>
> On Aug 23, 2005, at 1:47 PM, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
>
>> I think PUA is used on an experimental basis and will be moved to
>> character code, once approved.
>>
>> I like to hear technical views other than the temporary use of PUA, and
>> the discussions on weather it will be officially encoded or not, which
>> can be discussed at a later date. This will help avoid the stability
>> trap that all other languages find themselves in.
>>
>> Sinnathurai
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Hudson" <tiro@tiro.com>
>> Cc: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
>> Sent: Monday, August 22, 2005 10:35 PM
>> Subject: Re: 28th IUC paper - Tamil Unicode New
>>
>>
>>
>>> Richard Wordingham wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>> GSUB tables don't handle the reordering in Indic languages. It's the
>>>>> responsibility of the OpenType Layout processor, e.g. Uniscribe.
>>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> So how do I get it to live up to its 'responsibility' to support an
>>>> Indic conlang living in the PUA? I'm not even sure that Burmese is
>>>> supported yet.
>>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>>> While it clearly looks like good practice to have a single per- script
>>>> definition of necessary re-orderings, in practice it is very
>>>> inconvenient if the user (or system administrator) cannot update the
>>>> definitions. For example, Microsoft has little incentive to modify
>>>> Uniscribe to treat independent Devanagari vowels as consonants (or, to
>>>> be pedantic, consonant-vowel ligatures).
>>>>
>>>
>>> If you want something supported, you have to take it through the
>>> standards process and get it approved as part of Unicode or another
>>> standard that the software company in question is committed to
>>> supporting. If the behaviour you want to see for Devanagari becomes
>>> part of Unicode's processing requirements for that script, then you can
>>> expect Microsoft to support it.
>>>
>>>
>>> A shaping engine has no 'responsibility' to support an Indic conlang
>>> living in the PUA, because the shaping engine has no way of knowing
>>> that a string of PUA codepoints is text in an Indic conlang.
>>>
>>> The very nature of the PUA effectively makes it a dead end for most
>>> language processing, unless you have a very simple script in which
>>> there is a one-to-one correspondence between characters and glyphs and
>>> simple sequential, left-to-right display. Shaping engines simply don't
>>> know what to do when you pass them a PUA codepoint, because it could be
>>> *anything*. This is why using non- standard, PUA codepoints for any
>>> language processing is such a bad idea.
>>>
>>> John Hudson
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
>>> Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
>>>
>>> Currently reading:
>>> Lords of the horizons, by Jason Goodwin
>>> Dining on stone, by Iain Sinclair
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> ========
> John H. Jenkins
> jenkins@apple.com
> jhjenkins@mac.com
> http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
>
>
>
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