Re: glyph choices for char.scheme

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

Dear Nagu:
My apologies to you if I sounded rude in my posting.  I am getting
upset and fed up with false accusations that I as a brahmin is bent
on promoting grantha and hence trying to destroy tamil. 
I have no time nor intensions to get on to this caste war even if 
people try to push me into it. 
I respect highly your contributions to the ongoing
discussions and have no intensions to understate your capabilities.
As you know very well I am not a computer professional and so
please bear with me if I ask what may be obvious in the discipline.

> How electronic arhiving will be stopped if we do not have "Glyphs"
> for old-style letters?
> For storages those codes logically mean the same.
Regarding the old style characters, the way I see things is as follows:
old style lai is a distinct beast (graphical representation) by itself. 
If  the kokki has a separate code of its own, la following this kokki 
is a different object from the same la following the aikara modifier
(irandu chuzhi). If an old text had this lai occurring in the old form 
it will be keyed  in and stored in that form. Even in the same file 
if it appears in the new form it will be typed and stored in that form. 
Of course, in practical reading of the tamil script these two are one 
and the same. We can bring in software intervention if necessary
to identify the old style characters and replace them by the new format.
So for people's understanding, these old-style alphabets (six in
all, three with unique glyphs and three derived using the kokki)
are same but for storage and handling they are not the same.
Probably this is where we differ in our conceptual role of how the
old style characters are handled in the character encoding scheme.

The usage and implications of the old tamil numerals are also in the
same spirit. Tamil numeral one is a different object altogether and has
no relation whatsoever to the roman numeral 1.  The former series,
in electronic texts are pure graphic objects representing the way the
numerals were used. They cannot be used to input numbers or do
mathematical operations using the numeric keypad of the standard
keyboard for example. 

I am very reluctant to say anything more on grantha letters. Since
you raised a specific point on the need to have "ksha" vis-a-vis
having it replaced by ka + sha. Bottom line it is a question of 
personal preference and taste. If there is no space problems,
I do not mind having it. If I want to argue (I do not want to)
we can extend this argument and go back to Muthu's earlier 
propositions of writing thuu as thu followed by aakara kaal and
so on.

I already posted my clarification on diacritical markers so I will
not repeat them here. I fully agree with Muthu that using 
translators/convertors one can always go back between tamil
script text and a romanized text. My preferences are going for
a general /comprehensive truetype font that can directly implement
 input in both formats without the need for any additional 
software gimmicks.

>We have a set of codes that will map to all the characters in Tamil.
>That is we have a **representation** of all the characters that can
> be used to store all the Tamil characters.
If the input is #107 (roman k)  followed by #97 (roman a),
you may be able to read as ka on screen but in the reference
character code, the tamil alphabet will be there only if the glyphs
corresponding to tamil glyph ka is keyed followed by the aakara
modifier glyph. 
So when you do a search for the tamil alphabet ka, why should the
sequence of codes (#107)(#97) bother anyone. 
I still do not understand the problem if any. Please explain so that
we can converge.

Kalyan