On 2017/12/15 07:40, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 21:45:23 +0000
Cibu Johny (സിബു) <c...@google.com> wrote:
Malayalam could be a similar story. In case of Malayalam, it can be
font specific because of the existence of traditional and reformed
writing styles. A conjunct might be a ligature in traditional; and it
might get displayed with explicit virama in the reformed style. For
example see the poster with word ഉസ്താദ് broken as [u, sa-virama,
ta-aa, da-virama] - as it is written in the reformed style. As per
the proposed algorithm, it would be [u, sa-virama-ta-aa, da-virama].
These breaks would be used by the traditional style of writing.
Working round that seems to be tricky. The best I can think of is to
have two different locales, traditional and reformed, and hope that the
right font is selected. It doesn't seem at all straightforward to
work out what the font is doing even from a character to glyph map
without knowing what the glyphs are. I'm not sure how one should have
the difference designated - language variants, or two scripts?
I'm not at all familiar with Malayalam, but from my experience with
typing Japanese (where the average kana character requires two
keystrokes for input, but only one for deleting) would lead to different
advice. When typing, it is very helpful to know how many times one has
to hit backspace when making an error. This kind of knowledge is usually
assimilated into what one calls muscle memory, i.e. it is done without
thinking about it. I would guess that would be very difficult to
maintain two different kinds of muscle memory for typing Malayalam. (My
assumption is that the populations typing traditional and reformed
writing styles are not disjoint.)
Regards, Martin.
