From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2008 - 14:05:27 CDT
First of all, I will state up front that I have no objection
to the proposal as written -- it seems justified given the information
about the recent Kashmiri orthography reform.
> I suspect that most of the pre-composd isolate vowels were included for
> backwards compatibility with a pre-existing standard(s) like ISCII -
Yes, but not just for that reason.
> IMO there is no good reason to add additional pre-composed characters
> when a base character + combining mark will work fine particularly when
> these characters are for a what seems to be pretty well a brand-new
> orthography.
I disagree in this case. Devanagari works differently (for its
Unicode encoding) than Tibetan does.
U+0972 DEVANAGARI LETTER CANDRA A was added as recently as Unicode 5.1
(and not decomposed). We went through the same set of arguments then,
and I don't see the value of hashing through it every time another
example comes up.
> Preserving consistency could be used the next time someone wants to add
> more pre-composed Latin chars.
No, because precomposed Latin characters have canonical decompositions.
Devanagari (and most other Indic) independent matras do not.
> I thought there was a policy not to add more pre-composed characters. Is
> this not the case?
It generally *is* the case. But what that means is that characters
will not be encoded if by precedent characters of that type have
*canonical* decompositions to already encoded pieces.
It doesn't mean that there is an absolute proscription against
encoding complex graphic entities as characters.
--Ken
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