L2/14-188 Comments on proposal for Kannada Sign Spacing Candrabindu Shriramana Sharma, jamadagni-at-gmail-dot-com, India 2014-Jul-31 Ref: L2/14-153, Proposal to encode Kannada Spacing Candrabindu, Rajan L2/14-166, Attestations for Vedic usage of above, Srinidhi L2/14-170, Recommendations of script review committee 1) GC The review committee suggests the GC for this character should be Mc. I disagree. The cognate characters in other scripts carry Lo, not only A8F2 for Devanagari but also 1135E for Grantha, and for good reason (see below). Srinidhi has pointed out that the usage of this character in Kannada is not restricted to Badaga, but also present in Vedic. In my Grantha Vedic proposal L2/10-235 esp pp 2, 3 and 8 I have provided attestations for svara markers being applied to Vedic spacing candrabindu characters. If the GC of this character is made Mc, then in a sequence SYLLABLE + SPACING CANDRABINDU + SVARA MARKER, both this character and its svara marker would be analysed as belonging to the previous syllable and their independent base-mark relationship would be lost. Further, shaping engines would require unnecessary additional logic to place the svara marker correctly in relation to this character and not w.r.t. the preceding syllable. Rajan has also pointed out on p 2 of his proposal that this character combines with the anusvara. While GC=Mc is not inappropriate for such a combining behaviour since we always can have multiple marks (whether spacing or not) on a single base, it would indeed hinder the above svara marker requirement. As such, it is altogether more correct and straightforward to retain the GC=Lo of this character as proposed by Rajan. 2) Annotation Rajan proposes that this character be annotated as being used for Badaga. Given Srinidhi's evidence, the annotation should be expanded to include Vedic. 3) Codepoint Rajan proposes that this character be encoded at 0C80. I propose that it would be better to encode it at 0CF0 to be with the other rare-use (Vedic) characters for jihvamuliya and upadhmaniya. In both Devanagari and Grantha, this character has been grouped in that way. -o-