possible slot assignments for Tamil glyphs

[Tan Tin Wee <tinwee@irdu.nus.sg>]

Dear colleagues,

In response to the excellent initiatives and feedback of everyone
in this mailing list, I would like to send my heartiest
congratulations and best of wishes to all.

Regarding the issue of slot assignments for Tamil glyphs,
I believe that as far as slot assignments for each upper
range glyphs, we should, at the minimum, compare them with commonly used
symbols on the web so as to avoid using slots where symbols like
web bullets, copyright symbol, all rights reserved symbols etc.
occur. This belief is based on the assumption that there might
be a lot of people who will switch on the bilingual font
as the default base font on web browsers, which may not
necessarily be true.

Ultimately, it would be nice if every web author remembers to
invoke the <FONT> tag to block out a piece of Tamil text
for rendering in our nascent standard, rather than use
it as a default bilingual English-Tamil font as the
base font so that the above problem can be circumvented
and free us to design a slot assignment scheme which is
logically ordered, elegant and also
help in the sorting process.

Rgds

TIn Wee


Leong Kok Yong wrote:
> 
> Is the 'copyright' and 'All rights reserved' symbol required or important
> here?
> Because by not including it, web publisher will not be able to use this
> symbol in their web page. The copyright symbol is at ASCII 169. The 'all
> rights reserved' symbol is at 174.
> The problem will be more obvious when the this font is used to view an
> English-only page containing such symbols. The symbol will be display as a
> Tamil character at that code point.
>