Re: Suggestion for a simple solution of rendering problems of Devanari i matra

This is a terrible idea. U+094E, which you propose entering before 
consonant letters or conjuncts as the stem portion of ikar, is itself a 
left-ordering vowel sign, and would be reordered by Indic shaping 
engines. So not only would you be affecting the encoding of Devanagari 
text to obtain a particular display in the absence of a shaping engine, 
you would be doing so in a way that guarantees the text displays 
incorrectly when a shaping engine is used. Further, while your method 
might appear to work in some situations for the particular case of the 
Devanagari ikar, other Indian writing systems involve left ordering and 
split vowel signs that cannot be handled with this kind of hack.

Whether you like it or not, Unicode has encoded Indian scripts in a way 
that requires intelligent reordering of glyphs by shaping engines based 
on string analysis and shaping engine support. The response to this 
should be to ensure that such support is as widespread and consistent as 
possible, not to invent hacks that involve mangling text encoding and 
display.

JH

Received on Sunday, 20 July 2014 18:15:25 UTC