From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Apr 09 2005 - 07:52:08 CST
From: "Dean Snyder" <dean.snyder@jhu.edu>
> John Hudson wrote at 2:45 PM on Thursday, April 7, 2005:
>
>>I read Philippe's suggestion as changing the Malayalam zero character to
>>a 1/2 character, and then re-encoding the zero character, i.e. not
>>simply changing the existing zero glyph.
>
> Huh?
>
> This is how Philippe sums up, after addressing one scenario involving
> possible ISCII legacy issues:
>
> "So your comment rather suggests the addition of U+0D70 MALAYALAM DIGIT
> ONE HALF... with the glyph currently shown for MALAYALAM DIGIT ZERO, this
> glyph being corrected on the chart (this
> would minimize the impact because no other character properties would
> need to be changed)..."
In fact I also added that, for better interaction with those Malayalam
writers that expected to see the one-half glyph for the zero digit, a
variant could be encoded for digit zero, so that it would preferably adopt
the one-half glyph expected by those users. I don't know if this is actually
needed for today's texts, but it may be necessary for texts written in the
transitory period when the positional decimal system was adopted and the new
zero digit introduced wih possible ambiguity on the glyph to use (should it
be the circle glyph of letter ttha, or the legacy one-half glyph?).
If there does exists some printed texts in that period where a one-half
glyph is used in the decimal positional system where it actually means zero,
then this is a good argument in favor of adding such variant (coded with
existing MALAYALAM DIGIT ZERO, and VARIANT SELECTOR ONE), to respect the
initial writing of such legacy text.
I don't have an opinion about where to encode a new MALAYALAM ONE HALF DIGIT
(or NUMBER? or NUMBER MODIFIER?). One has said that Malayalam has in fact
much more characters to represent fractions, and that such fractions may
also exist in other indian scripts; should they go into the same block as
existing encoded scripts (if they still have modern use), or go into the SMP
with new "extended" blocks for those scripts (if these fractions only exist
for historic texts)?
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