From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sun Aug 21 2005 - 18:11:42 CDT
N. Ganesan wrote, on 21 August 2005:
>>However, the real issues is not conjuncts, but vowels that precede or
>>surround the consonant. Isn't it this plus phonetic order that that makes
>>Tamil Level-2?
>
> Isn't the PUA scheme in TUNE, Tamil Nadu level-1?
> That is what I understood from their paper or Philippe Verdy's mail.
> http://www.infitt.org/minmanjari/issue2_2/mm-unicodetngovt.html
If it is anything like described (7 bits for language, 5 bits for
consonant - clearly anti-Thai - because of links with Sri Lankan Buddhism? -
4 bits for vowel), it encodes Tamil as a C(V) syllabary, with the consonants
and vowels only available in the bits. To check how public the
documentation is, I've applied to join Yahoo group tune_rfc with the
attached reason:
"I heard on the Unicode mailing group that the definition of the TUNE
encoding was available here. I'd like to know what it is so I can check
that is as bad an idea as I think it is."
The number of codes needed matches the description - 25 by 16 codes.
(Plenty of gaps, I'm sure.)
This simplifies Tamil from level-2 to level-1 by changing from a character
encoding to an 'orthographic syllable' encoding.
> If someone produces a font with just the needed glyphs in tscii in PUA
> http://www.tamil.net/tscii/charset17.gif
> will it be level-1?
I believe so.
By the way, why can't font-encoded Tamil (e.g. using ASCII codes as a hack)
display be handled on Windows by a GSUB table that handles the re-ordering?
Or would that make it Level-2 anyway? Where can I find a definition of
'Level-2'?
Richard.
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