--- Marco Cimarosti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Also, why not use [CONS][ZWJ][CONS] instead of > > [CONS][VIRAMA][CONS]? One could then use [VIRAMA] > > only where it is explicit/visible. > > OK. But what happens when the font does not have a > glyph for the ligature <cons><ZWJ><cons>, nor for > the half consonant <cons><ZWJ>, nor for the > subjoined consonant <ZWJ><cons>? > > As <ZWJ>, per se, is an invisible character, what > happens is that your > string displays as <cons><cons>, which is clearly > semantically incorrect. If > you want the explicit virama to be visible, you need > to encode it as > <cons><VIRAMA><cons>. > > And this means that you (the author of the text) are > forced to chose between > <ZWJ> and <VIRAMA> based on the availability of > glyphs in the *particular* > font that you are using while typing. And this is a > big no no no, because it > would impede you to change the font without > re-typing part of the text. > > What happens with the current Unicode scheme is > that, if the font does not > have a glyph for the ligature <cons><VIRAMA><cons>, > nor for the half > consonant <cons><VIRAMA>, nor for the subjoined > consonant <VIRAMA><cons>, > the virama is *automatically* displayed visibly, so > that the semantics of > the text is always safe, even if rendered with the > most stupid of fonts.
I am no programmer, but surely the rendering engine could be tweaked to display a halant/hashant in the aforementioned situations? I understand that it won't happen *automatically* if we were to use <ZWJ> instead of <VIRAMA>. But if you were to take the trouble to do the tweaking, you'd then have a completely *intuitive* encodings for vowel yaphala sequences, <vowel><ZWJ><Y>, instead of oddities like <vowel><VIRAMA><Y>. > > Surely, [A/E][ZWJ][Y][ZWJ][AA] is more "natural" > > and intuitively acceptable than any encoding in > > which a vowel is followed by a [VIRAMA]? > > Maybe. But I see no reason why being natural or > intuitive should be seen as > key feature for an encoding system. That might be > the case for an encoding > system designed to be used by humans, but Unicode is > designed to be used by > computers, so I don't see the problem. Perhaps there isn't a *problem* as such, and perhaps naturalness and intuitive acceptability aren't *key* features of the system, but surely other factors being equal they ought be taken into consideration in choosing one method of encoding over another? > > I assume that in a well designed Bengali input > method, yaphala would be a > key on its own, > so, by the point of view of the user, it is just a > "character": they don't need to know that when they > press that key the > sequence of codes <VIRAMA><YA> will actually be > inserted, so they won't > notice the apparent nonsense of the sequence > <vowel><VIRAMA> and, as we say > in Italy, "If eye doesn't see, heart doesn't hurt". No, YAPHALA won't be a character on its own, only Y will be. The -PHALA in YAPHALA indicates that it is a combining variant of a grapheme. YAPAHALA will be a combining variant of Y to be inserted by the rendering engine in the appropriate environment. The user will *see* and key in the <ZWJ> between a consonant and a <Y> (or a vowel and <Y>) in order make the latter show up as a yaphala. Marco, thank you *very* much for your extremely helpful comments and feedback. Best, Gautam. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
