Dear Sinnathurai Srivas,
Is this a graphic showing the experimental diacritics you mention? http://www.geocities.com/avarangal/imagay1.gif If so, it should be possible for most of these to be encoded in text as pronunciation indicators using existing Unicode characters. Glyph - Unicode No. Poss. -------------------- 0152 U+0309 * 0094 U+0302 0153 U+0303 0154 U+0308 0155 U+0304 0156 U+031A 0134 U+0325 0096 U+E6FD ** 0135 U+0339 0136 U+02E9 *** 0137 U+???? 0138 U+2321 *** 0139 U+2218 *** * The reference glyph in the standard is reversed. But, the reference glyphs are only informative; the actual glyph shapes are up to the font developer. ** The stroke in Phaistos symbols in ConScript PUA encoding is the closest I could find. ***These characters were selected only for their appearance. With the above in mind, here's an attempt to encode part of the examples in the graphic linked above in Unicode (UTF-8): அ̉ அ̂ அ̃ அ̈ அ̄ அ̚ அ̄̉ க̥ க க̹ க˩ க? க⌡ க∘ Admittedly, the display of the above here is less than optimal, but this is a font/display issue rather than an encoding issue. (At least no dotted circles are appearing here in the display.) As Peter Constable wrote recently in reply to Keld Jørn Simonsen: >>My point has been that that language community would be much >>better served by dropping the idea of using "@" in this way and picking >>something else since, as suggested in your comment, 10646 has lots to >>choose from. And, this is a good point. There are many existing characters in Unicode from which to choose, not only for orthographies, but even for pronunciation symbols. William Overington and Martin Kochanski independently suggested that the Private Use Area would be well-suited for any experimental characters, in case some forms can't already be found, or existing Unicode forms are not acceptable. The PUA remains an option for the pronouncing glyphs. Font replacement by the system sometimes solves problems and sometimes makes problems. Arbitrary font-switching is not an encoding issue, but one way to avoid it is to use applications which either don't do it, or allow the user to disable it. Best regards, James Kass. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sinnathurai Srivas" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 7:44 AM Subject: Re: Tamil Text Messaging in Mobile Phones Dear James Kass, For a pronounciation Dictionary, a set of diacritics that is in experiment need to be included and when this additional (diacritics) occur in text, OS should not decide some thing is wrong with grammar and substitue with dotted circles or assumes the font is faulty and replaces with another font which does not know anything about this additional diacritics used. Sinnathurai Srivas
