On the proposal for a font encoding scheme

["Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram" <kalyan@igcsun3.epfl.ch>]

Dear Sujatha:
Thanks for your prompt response. 

Here are some quick responses to the points you raised:

> Is sorting taken care of or is it dependant on software tricks?
Only and if and only if we have all the 250+ tamil alphabets
taken as such in some ordered way in the font encoding scheme,
simple sorting by character number in the font encoding scheme
possible. Else  (as in the present case of bilingual 8-bit schemes)
one needs to resort to softwares to do the sorting. But this should
not be a complicated one to write. All that one needs is to write
up an equivalent mapping table for all 256 tamil characters where
the equivalents of character positions are shown. 

>How exactly are old style letters retrived ?
Old style Raa, Naa and naa can be included as such as a glyph
in the font encoding scheme. The modifiers of the old style letters
 (forward hook/kokki for lai/Nai/nai) allow getting the 
corresponding old style letters -in two keystrokes. Mylai
tamil font for example  allow typing these old style letters.

> Are diacritical marks enough to accommodate the romanised scheme?
The following markers are what we need:
horizontal bar that goes on the top of roman letter ( a, i, u, e, o, n,
)
horizontal bar that goes at the bottom of the roman letter (k, l, n )
virama type dot that goes at the bottom of the roman letter (t, n, l )
and virama type dot that goes on the top of roman letter (n ) 
In fact we do not need the last one, since one can use the same virama 
dot that are used with tamil consonants to get ik, ith, ip etc.

Is lower case way of writing adapted by research scholars?
As a response to Vasu's posting, in a seperate posting I raised this 
topic of what should be a standard for a transliteration scheme. 
Currently there are TWO types of scheme (each with own variations)
for writing transliterated tamil - one that uses diacritical markers
on roman characters and one that is based on plain ASCII.
Both schemes have their own merits and demerits. 

With best regards,
Kalyan