Now it may be pedantic of me, but I can just imagine a defence for the approach that these guys are taking.
The correct way of implementing Bengali is (as I think you are saying) as follows: 1. Use the defined Unicode code points. 2. Use (or design) a font that is intelligent enough to combine these code points into conjunct glyphs. 3. Do all this on a computer whose rendering engine is intelligent enough to understand and handle the font. Once 2 and 3 are so universal that you don't need to think about it, akshor.com's approach will be obsolete. But (2) the design of an intelligent font is quite a bit more difficult than designing an unintelligent font that contains a lot of private use characters. Perhaps there are lots of good Indic fonts around already: I don't know. And (3) it is not yet realistic to expect that all software will be able to handle the non-1-to-1 relationship between characters and glyphs, and it won't be for some time. You need an application that understands the distinction; an operating system that supports it properly; and display and printer drivers that don't corrupt the result. So as an *interim* solution, I think that this system has merit. I agree with you that it's not clear that they think of it as an interim solution, so they do need to be educated... and they also need to provide a transliterator that will take you back from their private-use character set to real Unicode, so that when their system does become obsolete, people don't get stuck with meaningless data. At 09:09 05/03/02, Dhrubajyoti Banerjee wrote: >Hi, > I was taking a bit of time off by searching what is available for Unicode >on Indic Scripts. I came across this site. > http://www.akshor.com/ > >Although I was quite amused at first, with excerpts like, "...To minimize >the codepage issue a brand new technology has lunched just a few years ago. >", I understood that people still do not (or do not even try to) understand >the basic philosophy behind coding standards. > >For example: >"..In ISCII and Unicode, most of our conjuct characters are missing and >another complexity in the input method; to form a 'reph' above the letter >'ba', for example, it is necessary to type: 'ra hosonto ba', the software >will in turn then convert this into: 'ba with reph above'. >I thing we need not be restrained by these so-called 'standards'. Because, >they can't and will not serve our need (Bengali) in my humble view. Thats >why we toke this project at our hand and working to impliment a universal >input method.." >(http://www.akshor.com/project1.html) > >And > >"..Unicode Consortium assigned 0980-09FF for Bengali (see previous page). >But this is not enough to saperate all our characters. Thats why we used the >Private Used Area (E100-E4FF) of Unicode for our project to assign & >saperate all our characters (excluded in UCS) including extended >characters/glyps and symbols. " >(http://www.akshor.com/project2.html) > >In fact they have put a huge number of "conjunct characters" in the Private >Use Area. Its a pity because it means that so many people still do not even >understand the difference between characters and glyphs. > >I hope Unicode proliferates fast in these areas so people can understand it >and use it without wasting time in such activities as reinventing the wheel. > > >regards, >Dhruba > >_________________________________________________________________ >Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com > > > >
