Hi,
Noriaki Inouye wrote:
>
> Oriyan Language
Ah! Something new!
> Hello. I'm interseted in Oriya language a little.
> I found a PDF file written in Oriya as follows:
> http://www.wbtc.com/articles/bibles/oriya/oriya_nt/Ori40Mt.pdf
>
> I can see some kinds of uniq ligatures on this file.
That is as expected: Oriyan (the Oriya script, really) does involve
a number of ligatures.
> I think these are not designed in the fonts like Arial Unicode MS,
> Lucida Sans Unicode,TITUS Bitstream Unicode,
As Marco said, this is no surprise from Lucida sans Unicode or
Bitstream, since they do not include _any_ support for Oriya.
For Arial Unicode MS, it depends on the version you are using:
the version shipped with Office 2000 (0.84) did only have only the
basic forms, not any ligatures (nor any of the mandatory features
to properly write Oriya, such as correct placement of the vowel
before the consonnant, reph, etc.) As such, it is not of much use
(as far as Oriya is considered) for use, except to display the Oriyan
characters in isolation, similarly to spelling letters (which is already a
big point).
The version that ships with Office Xp (0.90) is perhaps more complete
on this regard, but I doubt; in the future, we can expect a full version
of Arial Unicode MS, able to display correctly (i.e., with the basic
ligatures and re-arrangements the day-to-day use require) all the
Indic scripts.
> The expressions in Oriya Language not ordinary,
> unusesal, or illegal ?
?
> Are these ligature encoded in the area from U+0B01 to U+0B6F
> of the Unicode 3.x Chart Map ?
No, nor they need to.
For example, the first word reads as U+0B2E (ma) U+0B3E (+aa,
i.e. first syllable is maa) U+0B25 (tha) U+0B3F (+i, replacing a,
i.e. second syllable is thi) U+0B09 (u). Note there is no need for
the special form of the i vowel sign, the engine used (here Nisus
Writer) did take care of that (and this is where current versions of
Arial Unicode MS will fail), even if the resulting form is shown nowhere
in the Unicode charts.
> The map file "u0b00.gif" has many gray squares.
> Does it mean there are undisided Oriya charactors?
No, it only reflects theunaffected characters in the mapping used as
basis to encode Oriya (namely, 1988 draft version of ISCII, from the
Indian Burean of Standards).
Antoine
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