[Freebangfont-devel] Bangla Unicode stuff!

[Andy White]

Kaushik Ghose wrote on some other list or some place other ;-)

> Hi Andy et al,
> yes, its important that "we the people" take a part in fixing 
> the standards. [...]. The end game being arguments for 
> the logical encoding of these "exceptions"
> Anyone know how IISC handles these cases ? 
[e.g. 'A'+Japhalaa+AAkar, Ra+Japhalaa etc.] 

(I was wondering about cc'ing to the Indic Standards list.) 

The problem is that IISCI has not matured much from its original
specification. It seems to only have been popular with users of the
Devanagri script and as such, Bengali 'exceptions' have never been much
of an issue. In the past, if it didn't work you got a different
software, right? (or in the programmers case, if it doesn't work, use
yet another font encoding scheme of your own invention.)

The fact is this; the latest specification of ISCII, does not define
anything for Bangla; not 'khondoTo' nor 'jofola' not even bofola.
However, implementers of ISCII have used there own minds for these
things. E.g. CDAC encode AW+JAWFOLA+AAKAR as a separate letter, in a
spare code slot. They encode 'khondoTa'  as Ta+Virama when final, or
Ta+Virama+INV, to stop it forming a conjunct with the next letter, when
medial. (As Unicode does not have a INV letter, text encoded this way
may give us problems in the future.)

Why does Unicode need to be backwardly compatible with ISCII? especially
even when the Indian govt. doesn't seem to care? (If it cared, it would
be busy updating ISCII to reflect recent additions to Unicode)
Personally, I don't care! I would be happy to start afresh with a system
that really works. I don't think that there is that much iscii data out
there any way. Unfortunately the majority do seem to care, and any
proposals for additions to TUCS are always met with the question.

Andy