i18n-ISSUE-407: Clarification of initial letter example

5.1 First Letter
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-ilreq-20141216/#first-letter

"Note how the vowel sign appears to the left of the first character, not 
the third. There are three grapheme clusters here. The first includes 
the SA+VIRAMA,THA+I and T+II. We see that the styling is done on the 
basis of the syllable, not the first character. A syllable includes a 
base consonant and any combination of the following characters in the 
text stream:"

This text is misleading when paired with figure 4 when it talks about 3 
graphemes and there are 3 red circles. It also doesn't show first letter 
styling, as the text says, which is confusing. There is also an error in 
the romanization.

How about the following wording, based around the example at 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16084553630/
I also suggest renaming the section to Initial Letter Styling, to match 
the CSS Inline spec
---------
Indic script behavior in initial letter styling is based on syllables, 
rather than individual letter forms.

Figure 4 shows an example of a drop intial in Hindi. In the first word 
of the paragraph, स्कूल ('skūl'), the sequence of characters is stored in 
memory is as follows:

स ‎U+0938 DEVANAGARI LETTER SA
् ‎U+094D DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA
क ‎U+0915 DEVANAGARI LETTER KA
ू ‎U+0942 DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN UU
ल ‎U+0932 DEVANAGARI LETTER LA

There are two syllables in this word: SA+VIRAMA+KA+UU and LA. Note, 
however, that there are three Unicode grapheme clusters here: SA+VIRAMA, 
KA+UU and LA.

Styling is done on the basis of the whole orthographic syllable, not the 
first character, nor even the first grapheme.

A syllable includes a base consonant and any combination of the 
following characters in the text stream:
- sequences of consonants preceded by virama (i.e. conjuncts).
- vowel signs
- visarga, anusvara or candrabindu.


NOTE: The detailed definition of Indic syllables is given in section 2.

Here are some further examples of initial letter styling based on the 
Indic syllable definition.

...
---------

An alternative would be to take the above text and put it at the bottom 
of section 3 Text Segmentation, as an illustration of the point made in 
the last paragraph ("text segmentation should be done as Indic 
syllable"). This is useful because it clearly distinguishes between 
grapheme cluster and syllabic units, and could be referred to from other 
sections, too, such as the section on vertical text.

And then simply say, at the start of section 5.1 that selection of 
initial letters uses the orthographic syllable as the unit, as 
illustrated in section 2, and then simply give some examples. The 
majority of section 5.1 could then focus on more specific requirements, 
such as what styles of highlighting are common, and what the alignment 
points, etc, are.

Received on Monday, 26 January 2015 14:16:13 UTC