An adequate proposal for a complex script should surely include a proper
account of the script behaviour and sample glyphs of presentation forms.
And so such a proposal should include all that is needed for a
developer, and is available some time before the new script is
officially standardised.
There may be a few samples of presentation forms & conjuncts in a proposal -
but I've yet to see a proposal for Indic script that contains a comprehensive
set of all the presentation forms required to render all text written in that
script.
OK. Proposals don't include such a proper account, but I still consider that they should.
And perhaps they shouldn't have been there yet, because there are still so many open questions about them and because some properties have been frozen incorrectly. Witness the questions being asked about Oriya. Witness the 11,172 Korean characters which (according to Jungshik) "should never have been encoded" - that's 17% of the BMP wasted, more than that if we subtract non-characters, surrogates and PUA. Then there is Hebrew... These are all things which should have been sorted out and written up properly when the scripts were first proposed, and then clearly specified in the standard, or standard annexes.Character encoding proposals for complex scripts do not contain sufficient information for a developer to write rules for a layout engine for the script or enough information for a type designer to develop a font for the script.
If such information were a requirement I suspect a number of scripts that have already been encoded in the standard would not be there yet.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
