On Tuesday 07 October 2003 12:21, Gautam Sengupta wrote: > Is there any reason (apart from trying to be > ISCII-conformant) why the Bangla word /ki/ "what" > cannot be encoded as [KA][ZWJ][I]? Do we really need > combining forms of vowels to encode Indian scripts?
I don't know what the original motivations were, but one thing about the current (ISCII-based) encoding scheme that appeals to me is that on average it requires fewer characters than other more natural schemes. Bangla has a high percentage of 'vowel signs', each of which would require two characters in your scheme as opposed to one in the current one. > Also, why not use [CONS][ZWJ][CONS] instead of > [CONS][VIRAMA][CONS]? One could then use [VIRAMA] only > where it is explicit/visible. But this would not reflect the fact that the *glyph* [CONS][ZWJ][CONS] is actually the same thing as the *sequence of characters* [CONS][VIRAMA][CONS], i.e., [CONS][VIRAMA][ZWNJ][CONS] is also a perfectly legitimate representation. This latter decision is one that should be taken (normally) by the rendering mechanism (loosely speaking, the font), not the author. Deepayan
