Hi Naena Guru, There are a number of factual errors in your emails, but I'll stick to Unicode Sinhala specific errors.
On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 20:34 -0500, Naena Guru wrote: > Unicode Sinhala violates the Unicode > standard it belongs to! How? > You cannot do simple word processing tasks we take > for granted with English, no way to sort. Grab a modern GNU/Linux distro and you'll be able to do all of the above. On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 09:30 -0600, Naena Guru wrote: > The following line is Unicode text: > මේ අකුරු ලියා ඇත්තේ යුනිකෝඩ් අකුරෙනි. > > I bet most of you see it as a row of Character-not-found glyph. Some would > see it in the non-Latin script, but yet separated into meaningless > components that go to make letters. No, I see Sinhala words. On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 23:33 -0600, Naena Guru wrote: > The systems sold outside Sri > Lanka do not have Sinhala Unicode, which is understandable because the > community is very small. That's not true. GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows now ship with Unicode Sinhala support. The quality of the implementation varies, but you should direct those complaints to Apple & MS. If you see problems with GNU/Linux, then complain to me. > Then there are cases where even if you have the font, the characters do not > combine. You all may have seen the Sinhala font, but how do I know you if > you could actually read it? Here is a screen shot someone sent me two days > back asking me to fix it. I could not help the person, and that is tragic. > > https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B0OoSILYvguZZDMzYzE1MDUtMjk2OS00YWI3LTk3NGItMDAyYzY2MmYwNWEy&hl=en_US > > The first characters you see in this screen shot is ශ්රී. These are two > letters that should combine to form this letter: ශ්රී . Combinations do > not happen anywhere and it is gibberish for the reader. There have been a number of components/applications that have mishandled ZWJ. One particular issue that pops up is some developers think filtering out ZWJ is a great idea, thereby the ZWJ never reaches the font lookup stage. Having said that, the example you bring up is phonetically equivalent though visually distinct. A native Sinhala speaker would still understand the word. cya, #
