On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > On Saturday 26 June 2010 10:34:43 Akilan R wrote: > > GNU - குனு [3 in Eng - 4 in Tamil] > > 2 in tamil > > Linux - லினக்ஸ் [5-7] > > 4 in tamil > > Python - பைத்தான் [6 - 8] > > 4 in tamil > > please check out the unicode encoding - so actually tamil is shorter than > english >
No. கு is stored as க + ு. That is U+0B95 U+0BC1. Only during rendering they are combined and displayed properly. Similarly for all others characters too. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_script#Tamil_in_Unicode for Table listing of all letters storage. This is very illustrative: க்ஷி --> 0B95 0BCD 0BB7 0BBF. http://infitt.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=188: Unicode, on the contrary, encodes only basic uyir and mei characters and a > set of modifiers to represent situations where the uyir/mei pair appear as a > combination (uyirmei). Unicode file stores textual information solely at > this "character" level. It does not care about the actual form of the > glyphs. Rendering of the glyphs corresponding to stored characters is left > to softwares. > > 4. How do Unicode fonts work? > > As stated in (2), in Unicode, unique glyph forms of uyirmeis are stored > separately and are "rendered" on the screen when a Unicode-based text file > is displayed using softwares. > > The process of picking up these unique glyph forms of uyirmeis stored in > the font and rendering them on the screen is called "glyph substitution > (GSUB)".A new Font technology called "OpenTrueType" (OTT) has been developed > for use with Unicode. > Although it is desirable to have one Unicode code for each character, it is not possible since Unicode has allocated onle 128 codes whereas Tamil has more than 300 characters including grantha forms. This has been a source of many controversies. See http://unicode.org/faq/tamil.html and http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/NamedSequencesProv.txt for further details. please check out the unicode encoding. -- அகிலன்(Akilan R) (http://www.coding-aviator.blogspot.com) "I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell." --Jean Rostand _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
