Where, if anywhere, is the encoding of plain text specified? I am particularly concerned with the arrangement of the code sequences for non-spacing abstract characters once one has determined an encoding for the abstract characters.
For example, a naive reading of TUS 9.0 Section 16.4 Subsection "Ordering of Syllable Components" would lead one to believe that the word _khnyom_ 'I' shall be encoded as <U+1781 KHMER LETTER KHA, U+17D2 KHMER SIGN COENG, U+1789 KHMER LETTER NYO, U+17BB KHMER VOWEL SIGN U, U+17C6 KHMER SIGN NIKAHIT>. However, on further investigation, I cannot find any text that says that <U+1781, U+17C6, U+17D2, U+1789, U+17BB> would not be compliant with the Unicode standard. Have I missed anything? One might hope that the subsection about 'logical order' in TUS 9.0 Section 2.2 Unicode Design Principles would help, but: 1) Section 3 'Conformance' says nothing about logical order; and 2) The subsection about 'logical order' seems to assume that there exists a common practice; it does not actually place any requirement on this common practice. Richard.
