Re: Unicode for Malayalam Language.

From: Glenn Adams (glenn@cam.spyglass.com)
Date: Tue Oct 21 1997 - 07:22:59 EDT


I suspect you are referring to conjunct ligatures or other
half-consonant forms. If so, you should realize that these
glyphs need not be encoded as characters for information
interchange. Unicode assumes that fonts typically contain
a larger set of glyphs than the set of characters encoded
for a particular script. A rendering engine is assumed to
exist for the purpose of mapping characters to glyphs, selecting
the appropriate glyph based on lexical context. [Here lexical
refers to 'character' parsing as opposed to any higher-level,
language sensitive parsing.]

So, to answer your question, these will not be included in
future versions of Unicode. That is, unless you can make
a very strong case for why some glyph cannot be deterministically
chosen based on simple, non-linguistic context.

Regards,
Glenn Adams



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