L2/01-101 From: Rick McGowan Date: 2001-02-09 17:29:37 -0800 To: pavanaja@tallysolutions.com Subject: Kannada - discussion at UTC 86 Hello again Dr. Pavanaja... After the Unicode meeting, I am finally getting around to replying in detail to your paper and recent query. Sorry it has taken several days. The Kannada paper you sent to me was discussed briefly at the meeting, and it was distributed to members of UTC before the meeting. (The assigned UTC document number was L2/01-037.) The UTC wished me to express their thanks for sending this paper, with its wealth of detail about Kannada script handling. The UTC will incorporate much of this explanatory material into the Standard's block introduction for Kannada, and character annotations where appropriate. This will probably happen by Unicode 3.2 or 4.0, depending on how much editorial work is required, and on the editorial schedule. In regard to sorting (Part 2 of your document), the committee wished to point out that sorting of codepoints will not result in a good order for anyone. This appears to be understood by the authors of the paper. Sorting is done by using the Unicode Collation Algorithm. The URL for information on the Unicode Collation Algorithm (Unicode Technical Report #10) is: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10/ You and your colleagues should probably look at this technical report and verify that the "default" collation sequence for Kannada makes sense. See if there are any required annotations or special cases that should be handled. The base key listing for Most of the Kannada elements should be easy to find in this list: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10/basekeys.txt UTC also wished to point out for your information that the Government of India is a full member of the Consortium, and Dr. Om Vikas has recently been involved with UTC. (He was not present that this meeting, however.) His contact information is: Government of India, Ministry of Information Technology Electronics Niketan, 6, Lodi Road New Delhi - 110 003 INDIA Dr. Om Vikas Senior Director Tel: 91-11-436-3076 Fax:91-11-436-3076 EMAIL: omvikas@mit.gov.in It might be helpful to coordinate among industry groups and government in India for future submissions of characters, collation questions, and so forth. In regard to character movement and deletion, Appendices 1 and 3 cannot be considered. UTC wished to note specifically that characters may not be moved or deleted. The Kannada script has been included in Unicode since the beginning (1990) and has been standardized for some ten years. It is the policy of UTC as well as ISO/IEC SC2/WG2 that characters, once encoded, shall not be moved or removed. Moving characters is considered to create unacceptable instability in the standard, and would invalidate data that has existed for many years. UTC would urge you and others in your experts group to look carefully at the existing Kannada encoding with an eye toward implementations. If there are additional characters that must be added for support of esoteric literature, Sanskrit scholarship, and so forth, please contact us again. You can fill out the required form for new character submission. Please see the Unicode web page: http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html for further details. That detail page also contains a pointer to the on-line form, and I list it here: http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/form1.html This form is required by Unicode and WG2 both. I can assist with further details if you do have proposals for additional historical or scholarly-use characters. Warm regards, Rick McGowan Unicode, Inc.