Re: [WMASTERS] Design goals of 8-bit Tamil encoding standard

[govindasamy <govind@irdu.nus.sg>]

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govindasamy wrote:
> 
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> Mani M. Manivannan wrote:
> >
> > ________________________________________________
> >
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> >
> > Since September we have been discussing the original draft proposed
> > standard of Dr. Kalyan that has been revised four times as a result of this
> > discussion.  Recently Dr. Selvaa proposed a serious alternative standard.
> > During the discussion of this draft standard, we have considered
> > linguistic, political, historical as well as emotional issues.  The
> > discussions have at times wandered into areas that have contributed little
> > to the standards process.  This is perhaps inevitable with a truly
> > multinational group very interested in the welfare of the Tamil language
> > and particularly since the design goals of the standard have not been
> > clearly spelled out.
> >
> > Standards bodies have a tough task.  They should be conservative and desist
> > from any attempt to innovate, reform or otherwise tamper with an
> > established convention. At the same time they should anticipate the users
> > needs. Otherwise the standard risks getting rejected by the users of the
> > standard.  We will not be discussing a new standard if we are happy with
> > UNICODE or ISCII for our current needs.
> 
> Mani, thanks for pulling me in to give my comments. you posted a valid
> question. you are right. The Draft version of the proposed  version of
> ISCII -1997, which is prepared by the Deparment of Electronics -
> committee, will take care of all the things that we are discussing- with
> slight modification.
> just for info, the 1997 ISCII draft is aim at to arrive at an encoding
> that satisfies the following important requirements:
> 1.  An encoding scheme that is independent of the input
> process(keyboard, speech, OCR, hand writing, ect.)
> 2.  An encoding scheme that is independent of the output or rendering
> process (display, print, speech, etc.)
> 
> the committee, which was set up by Government of India, in November
> 1996, has taken into accounts the followings, before drafting ISCII
> -1997:
> 1.  The use of Internet as a vast source of electronic information
> 2.  the increasing demands on information management applications, and
> 3.   the interest expressed by a number of International Computer system
> manufacturers to provide Indian language support in their system.
> 
>  Mani, how many of us involved in this discussion has given thought for
> the proposed ISCII-97,  and the implication it will bring to UNCODE? The
> present Unicode is implemented with the recommendation of DoE and BIS
> (Bureau of Indian Standards) based on ISCII 91 version. If this Draft
> version of ISCII-97 is accepted as a standard, the next version of
> UNICODE, will have the new code. UNICODE is tied with ISCII, DoE & BIS.
>  Eventhough I am in TNSCommitte, I know pretty well, that the Tamil Nadu
> government cannot overrule DoE’s decision. TNSC can recommend to Tamil
> Nadu government, to put a proposal to make slight changes in the
> ISCII-97, provided we have a strong case to argue.  Tamil Nadu
> government cannot make new standard on encoding.
> On 11 Sep you posed some very good questions. (What the recommended
> process for character encoding standards creation and acceptance by
> international standard bodies? ) I hope somebody will answer you.
> 
> >
> > I am glad that most of the Tamil font and software developers are active in
> > this discussion.  I am not a Tamil software developer and I have no vested
> > interest in the outcome except as a Tamil software user.  I hope the group
> > will not be offended with my attempt to focus our efforts by explicitly
> > stating the design goals.  I have used the Unicode standard and the archive
> > of the Tamil standard discussions that Dr. Kalyan kindly provided me.  I
> > expect the participants of this discussion to augment and refine these
> > statements.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Tamil character encoding standard design goals:
> >
> > 1. Establish a consistent international Tamil character standard that can
> > be  used by software publishers, Web publishers, newspaper adn book
> > publishers,  bibliographic information services, and academic researchers.
> >
> > 2. Encode characters, not glyphs.
> 
> on Sep 17 AnbuArasan clearly explain, that the proposed encodings should
> be based on basic characters  not glyphs, and he gave the reasons. At
> this point we have to look at his mail seriously. can any one of you
> repost that mail?
> >
> > 3. Must be universal. The standard must be include all characters that are
> > likely to be used in everyday Tamil text interchange.
> >
> > 4. Must be efficient. "Plain text, composed of a sequence of fixed-width
> > characters, provides an extremely useful model because it is simple to
> > parse: software does not have to maintain state, look for special escape
> > sequences, or search forward or backward through text to identify
> > characters." From Unicode 2.0 standard.  ( Note: This goal may be
> > problematic for Tamil character standard. When we violate this standard, we
> > must be very careful to consider alternatives and explicitly state the
> > reasons, if any for vioalting this goal.)
> >
> > 5. Must be Uniform.  "A fixed character code allows efficient sorting,
> > searching, display, and editing of text." From Unicode 2.0. (Note: Once
> > again, Tamil standard violates this goal in some places by encoding some
> > characters with a single byte, but other characters with a modifier.
> > However, Unicode itself does exactly that for Indic languages. When
> > considering exceptions, we can use Unicode as a useful guide for
> > implementation.)
> >
> > 6. Must be Unambiguous.  Any 8-bit value should always represent the same
> > character. (Note:  This pretty much kills ORNL.)
> >
> > 7. Must be usable and coexist with popular software until Unicode compliant
> > software becomes available.
> >
> > 8. Must be Unicode compatible.  (i.e.) Shall not use characters that cannot
> > be saved in Unicode format. (Note:  The TNC/DOE-India may require an ISCII
> > compatibility as well. )
> >
> > 9. Must be in the public domain. The character encoding standard will have
> > no restrictions on its use.  It can be used freely for both commercial and
> > private purposes.  Enhancements, alterations and other changes to the
> > standard will be done only by the standards body.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > I will include another extract from the Unicode standard that can guide us
> > to focus on the task at hand and bring it to a reasonable conclusion:
> >
> > "The .. standard does not encode idiosyncratic, personal, novel, rarely
> > exchanged, or private-use characters, nor does it encode logos or graphics.
> >  Artificial entities, whose sole function is to serve transiently in the
> > input of text, are excluded.  Graphologies unrelated to text, such as
> > musical and dance notations, are outside the scope of the .. standard.
> > Font variants are explicitly not encoded.  The .. standard includes a
> > private use  area, which may be used to assign codes to characters not
> > included."
> >
> > It is my belief that the current draft proposed standard and Dr. Selvaa's
> > alternative are identical in essential details, except those that Dr.
> > Selvaa  himself has noted.  I notice that there is some consensus around
> > the proposed standard from such font creators as Dr. Kalyan, Muthu
> > Nedumaran, Dr. Srinivasan and Prof. Hart.  Prof. Schiffman had expressed a
> > willingness to accept the draft proposed standard.  Mr. Ravi Paul has
> > raised specific problems with the draft standard but seems to support the
> > standard otherwise.  Prof. Naa. Govindasamy, a pioneer of the Tamil on the
> > Internet effort and a member of the TNC has not commented on the draft
> > proposed standard.
> 
> Mani, I am not a prof. just address me as Govind.
> In fact I don’t want to participate in this discussion.. I preferred to
> be a silent observer and a silent worker. since I was dragged in, I may
> give my comments in a few days.
> 
>  I am eagerly waiting for his technical documentation of
> > TamilNet Font's character encoding
> 
> There is a paper (INET96, Montreal, June 1996) lying in this site (
> http://aua.am/aua/auacs/inet'96/a5/ ) you will get some kind of
> technical explanation on  TamilNet font encodings

Mani, the link is not correct. the URL is
http://aua.am/aua/auacs/inet'96/a5/
sorry for mistake.
Thanks
anbudan
Naa Govindasamy
> 
>  and his comparison of TamilNet encoding
> > with alternate encoding conventions.
> 
> Mani, I have not thought of that. If there is need, I may consider it.
> 
> Thanks.
> Naa Govindasamy
> >
> > Mani M. Manivannan
> > Fremont, CA, USA.
> >
> > P.S.
> > I am sorry for this very long post.  I hope this nudges everybody to focus
> > on the goal and iron out differences using technical guidelines.  By
> > training I am a technician not a writer.  I hope I haven't offended anybody
> > with my writing style.  If I did, I apologize to all in advance.  And if
> > anybody wants to correct my style, please, please send me personal e-mail.
> >
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