On Sat, 10 Nov 2001 Arjun Aggarwal wrote :
>I just cannot see how a half character can be formed by adding a halant
>after full letters.It does not lead to a visible half letter. It is the
>visible half letter that we need here.
As the previous mails on this subject detail, there is a difference between
what is visible and what is encoded.
Visible half *glyphs* are taken from the font (and that is exactly what you
see on screen) while the halant lies after the full *character*
in the data. Please understand the underlying difference between "encoded
characters" and "displayable characters" (which essentially comprises the
font).
>But since
>Devnagari has been used for a long time now and is being used as "encoding
>half letters and forming full letters by adding a danda " in every field
> in Typewriters , Hindi fonts, books, typography , defence , teaching ) ,
>this is the form that needs to be encoded in Unicode.
Devanagari has not exactly been used as you specify. Devanagari script
consists of 'vargas' which in their turn consist of Consonants ('Ka', 'Kha'
..) and the Nasals. All consonants are *full* forms and take the half shapes
while forming conjuncts (i.e. that is when the Halant is added to a
preceding consonant). Only consonants containing right stem have 'dandas'
('Kha', 'Ga', ' Cha' etc). Central stem ('Ka' and 'Pha') and round
characters('da', 'Ta' etc) do not have 'dandas'.
>There in no need to
>throw away 10 years of work. The half characters can be encoded in place of
>their full characters and a danda added in the code in a single reserved
>space in the series.
>
Please refer to my previous paragraph. Just as a query, what would you do
for the 'Ka'? The half 'Ka' is essentially a Full-Ka with the 'tail'
shortened. Would you put half the tail as a separate character?
>Would somebody tell me what a ZWJ control is and how to include it in
>documents i create for Unicode compliant softwares.
>
>Please comment on the above and give a possible solution.
ZWJ is the Zero Width Joiner and prevents the joining of consecutive
characters on output. It is a control character similiar to INV character
mentioned by Marco Cimarosti. For more details please check out the Unicode
3.0 document.
Dhrubajyoti Banerjee
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