...SPACE is unsuitable for this function for at least two good reasons:
Having an 'invisible consonant' to call for rendering of the vowel sign
in isolation (and without the dotted circle), would also help the limited
number of cases where the styled single character is needed - but in
a rather hackish way.
That is what the SPACE as base character is for. If some renderers insist on rendering such combinations with a dotted circle glyph, that is an issue in the renderer -- it is not a defect in the encoding standard for not having a way to represent the vowel sign in isolation.
1) because of its word and line breaking characteristics;
2) because in a case like this no extra spacing is required. The vowel sign is a spacing character in itself, although a combining mark. SPACE is expected to add its own spacing. In the absence of clearly defined rules to the contrary, renderers will render this combination of SPACE with a Tamil vowel with an extra space which is not wanted. (As for which side of the vowel the space will appear, that is anyone's guess!)
This is yet another example to add to a number that I have identified showing that the reuse of SPACE and NBSP as carriers for diacritics is an undesirable overloading of character semantics. I propose again a new base character for carrying combining marks, with no glyph and a width just as wide as that required to display the combining marks. The mechanism already defined for using SPACE and NBSP for this should be deprecated, although not abolished.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
