> 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.
There is a trade-off here between file size and the number of code points used. File size could be further reduced, for example, if combining forms of consonants were introduced. But that would be a step in the wrong direction for various reasons that I will not discuss here. I am not sure that the right thing to do is to economize on file size rather than code points. > > > 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], But, it is not, certainly not in writing; and that's the whole point. [CONS][ZWJ][CONS] and [CONS][(EXPLICIT)VIRAMA][CONS] are "identical" at a level of linguistics abstraction that need not be reflected in text encoding. Consider [C][L] and [C][L][VIRAMA]. They represent the same words, they are the "same" at some level of representation, but that is irrelevant for the task at hand. > This latter decision is one that should be taken > (normally) by the rendering mechanism (loosely > speaking, the font), not the author. I disagree. If an author chooses to write a word with an explicit virama, you have to respect that and let it be reflected in the encoding. Leaving such decisions to the rendering engine would destroy the character and flavor of certain texts. Furthermore there are metalinguistic uses of the explicit virama that need to be kept distinct from forms with conjoined characters. Thanks Deepayan for your feedback. -Gautam __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
