[smc-devel] Re: Malayalam OpenType font (GPL'ed)

[Miikka-Markus Alhonen]

Hi!

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, Baiju M wrote:
> There is small problem with rendering of Malayalam vovel sign AU (U0D4C).
> Nowadays we are not using the shape of that character as specified in
> Unicode Malayalam chart (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0D00.pdf),
> instead we are using the shape of U0D57 (Malayalam AU length mark).
> Minstry of IT ( Govt. of India ), a member of unicode consortium has
> prosed a change in this (Its not making any backward compatibility
> problem,
> just the character shape is changing). So the rendering of that charcter
> can
> be changed in yudit.

Here's what I don't understand: If the "au" vowel is consistently shown
with the glyph of U+0D57 in modern Malayalam, why couldn't you encode it
as such, too, and leave U+0D4C just for the old style of the script?

I don't speak Malayalam myself, so please forgive me my ignorance if I'm
missing the point, but from the technical point of view this would seem
like the simplest solution. Changing a vowel sign to be a right-side-only
combining mark instead of a two-part combining mark breaks implementations,
if not the standard itself.

(Besides, I think it _would_ break even the standard, since then you would
have to alter the canonical decomposition of U+0D4C, which is strictly
against the policy of the Unicode Consortium.)

Just my 0.02 euros as a developer of the Yudit editor...

Best regards,
Miikka-Markus Alhonen