Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

["Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil)" <mnedumar@sg.oracle.com>]

Nagu,

Well said.   You are also right about us encoding *glyphs* with *as much*
characters.  However, I see the following as a *justification* to do so.

1. Ecoding pure characters may *cut-off* hobbyists who develop fonts for
   Tamil without any inclination to writing codes (manipulation routines)

2. Though we encode glyphs *occasionally* we are (I hope) taking steps
   to ensure that, under normal circumstances, it'll not make sense to
   encode the same *letter* with any other combination of characters.
   For example, we have assigned specific glyphs for all mey's (dotted's).
   We are also ensuring (my point at least) that we do not leave the
   'dot' character hanging around to cause ambiguity.  In other words,
   one whould not, even by accident, store 'k' as 'ka' + 'pulli' (since
   'pulli' does not exist as a *character*).

3. Having ensured that (2) is taken care of, people in (1) can freely
   create fonts without messing up the *standard* format of storing
   Tamil etext.

4. (1), (2) & (3) *are* the main reasons why I'm opposing ORNL

5. We *are* thinking of alternate ways of rendering ORNL for those
   who need to view text in that format - though it takes special
   conditions, it's (IMHO) more than worth the trade-off.

Comments ..... ?

anbudan,

~ MUTHU

At 07:15 PM 9/15/97 -0400, Nagarajan Chinnasamy wrote:
>Dear Bala,
>
>Unicode has the concept of ligatures. It says those old codes optionally
>**ligate** in old styles.
>
>So, Unicode did not leave old style **forms**. Because its a way of
>rendering
>the letters. Unicode just bothers about encoding characters not the
>glyphs.
>
>But the table we have is a collection of Glyphs (though we might try to
>keep as much **characters** as possible). Yes. We need them. Only if we
>are particular about showing them in Old Style.
>
>But if we keep separate codes for those old forms it will unnecessarily
>confuse the text processing(any application that tries to make sense out
>of the text!) applications.
>
>What anybody will lose if you show "a,nnn,nnnaa" as "a,nnn,nnna,kaal".
>Do
>they get any other meaning out of it??? 
>
>The text is Old in its content not in its Letters.
>
>NOTE: I Did Not say anything about Tamil Numerals. Will write about it
>latter.
>
>anbudan,
>nagu.
>
>
>
>Bala Pillai wrote:
>> 
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>> 
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>> At 06:42 PM 9/15/97 +0000, Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram wrote:
>> 
>> >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.
>> 
>> Kalyan and anybody else who may know:
>> 
>> How cast in stone is UNICODE 2.0 as it applies to Tamil script? Is it not
>> possible that our discussions would affect a revised version of UNICODE 2.X
>> ? My limited knowledge of UNICODE Tamil deliberations suggest that it did
>> not get much (not anybody's fault mind you) airing.
>> 
>> anbudan.../bala
>> 
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