Re: glyph choices for char.encoding -version 1.2

[Vasu Renganathan <vasur@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>]

Like Kumar points out, we can avoid allocating spaces for diacritic
symbols, if it is such a difficult thing.
  
Actually, if there are slots, we can also accomodate the diacritic
symbols, which aren't that many. We will have to use only four symbols.

1) length symbol (bar on vowels)

2) retroflex - dot under retroflex consonants

3) palatal symbol to be placed on n

4) underscore to make alveolar nasal (2 cuzhi n) and trilled r

one or two more symbols may be needed like two dots under (tamizh r)  and
so on.  If we have these symbols, in the slot, the rendering software is
going to do the job of placing them in appropriate place.  What do you
think?

Aside from the discussion on font/diacritic encoding discussions, I think
there is also a need for having a standard plain ASCII roman scheme to
render the font through a transliterator software.  Like Sujatha
mentioned, we can adopt one that is already existing - Asian institute's
scheme or Thomas Malten's scheme.  Asian Institute uses diacritics, and I
am not sure if they have any equivalent ascii version. Tamil lexicon is
on-line with Thomas Malten's scheme.

>From my little experience in Tamil computing, I think, using
transliterated document and a rendering software (transliterator) is more
convenient for practical purposes than using Tamil keyboard, especially
for inputting data in a large scale. One other advantage of using plain
ascii roman form of Tamil is to build spell checkers and thesauri
software, in case if they are ever going to be developed in future (or,
do they exist anywhere?). It is too complicated to use Tamil font for
processing words for the purposes of spell checkers and thesauri. 

I reproduce here Thomas Malten's scheme for a discussion.

a  A  i  I  u U  e  E  ai  o  O  au  H

k, g, c n^/jn T N t n p m y r l v z L R n_/n2

We can try to avoid the use of capital letters, as they slow down the
speed of typing.  I would prefer aa rather than A etc. nj instead of jn; 
n2 instead of n_ are my other choices.

Vasu.

> > 
> > Let's hope we hear them too - not just a *vote* of yes
> > or no - but with some supporting notes :-)
> > 
> > >i) Should be go for transliteration schemes that are 
> > >    based on plain ASCII without diacritics or 
> > >    adopt a scheme with diacritics ?
> > >ii) what should be the actual scheme under either of
> > >   the above two possibilities?
> > >
> > >If we decide to go for plain ASCII without diacritics,
> > >then there is no need to keep these markers in the
> > >character encoding scheme.
>