Gautam Sengupta wrote: > 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>.
OK but, then, your <ZWJ> becomes exactly what Unicode's <VIRAMA> has always been: a character that is normally invisible, because it merges in a ligature with adjacent characters, but occasionally becomes visible when a font does not have a glyph for that combination. But there is one detail which makes your approach much more complicated: what we have been calling <VIRAMA> is *not* a single character. Every Indic script has its own: <DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA>, <BENGALI SIGN VIRAMA>, and so on. Each one of these characters, when displayed visibly, has a distinct glyph: a Bangla hashant is a small "/" under the letter, a Tamil virama is a dot over the letter, etc. With your approach, the single character <ZWJ> is overloaded with a dozen different glyphs depending on which script the adjacent letters belong to. Plus, it still has to be invisible when used in a non-Indic script, such as Arabic. Implementing all this is certainly possible, but would result in bigger look-up tables, for no advantage at all. > 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? Yes. But the flaws that I see in ISCII/Unicode model are much smaller than you imply. E.g., I agree that it would have been more logic if: - independent and dependent vowels were the same characters; - each script was encoded in its natural alphabetical order; - there were no precomposed and decomposed alternatives for the same graphemes. And others, on which perhaps a linguist won't agree, but which would have made life much easier to programmers: - all vowels were encoded in visual order, so that vowel reordering was necessary; - "repha ra" were encoded as a separate characters, so that no reordering at all was necessary. But, all summed up, leaving with these little flaws is *much* simpler than trying to change the rules of a standard a dozen years after people started implementing it. _ Marco
