Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

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

Dear Prof. Hart:
 
I tried to put up various practical aspects
as applicable to electronic archiving. 

I am still at a loss to understand how 
alternative approaches of software intervention
(macros or other) or glyph substitution
or others for replacing new ones by old ones
transported across platforms.  How are
such replacements tagged in the file for 
transportation across platforms? If such files 
are exchanged, the receipient also must have 
equivalent softwares or Macros (?) or glyph 
substitution to reverse the process.
No one has explained this. I am not at all
optimistic that these alternatives can be
implemented without hitches across all platforms 
(PCs, Mac and UNIX). We may need an explicit
written protocol.

I do not want to prolong anymore the arguments
for having or not old style characters (ORNL).
For now, I give up on ORNL.  Glyphs for these
have already been dropped in the current version 1.3.
 
> If Kalyan is so desperate to preserve the
> writing of older manuscripts, the writing system 
> must be authentic, and so we will need separate 
> glyphs for 10, 100, etc
Agreed. In the draft version of encoding scheme (1.3),
the tamil numerals listed do include slots for numerals
10, 100 and 1000.
Old style numerals were proposed for two reasons:
 i) to provide compatibility with UNICODE 2.0 and 
ii) for possible use in electronic archiving of 
ancient tamil literature.

Thanks a lot for sharing your viewpoints and please
accept my apologies for being critical.


Kalyan