Response to comments about Unicode Sinhala [Re: combining: half, double, triple et cetera ad infinitum]

From: Harshula <harshula_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:31:32 +1100

Hi Naena Guru,

There are a number of factual errors in your emails, but I'll stick to
Unicode Sinhala specific errors.

On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 20:34 -0500, Naena Guru wrote:
> Unicode Sinhala violates the Unicode
> standard it belongs to!

How?

> You cannot do simple word processing tasks we take
> for granted with English, no way to sort.

Grab a modern GNU/Linux distro and you'll be able to do all of the
above.

On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 09:30 -0600, Naena Guru wrote:
> The following line is Unicode text:
> මේ අකුරු ලියා ඇත්තේ යුනිකෝඩ් අකුරෙනි.
>
> I bet most of you see it as a row of Character-not-found glyph. Some would
> see it in the non-Latin script, but yet separated into meaningless
> components that go to make letters.

No, I see Sinhala words.

On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 23:33 -0600, Naena Guru wrote:
> The systems sold outside Sri
> Lanka do not have Sinhala Unicode, which is understandable because the
> community is very small.

That's not true. GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows now ship with Unicode
Sinhala support. The quality of the implementation varies, but you
should direct those complaints to Apple & MS. If you see problems with
GNU/Linux, then complain to me.

> Then there are cases where even if you have the font, the characters do not
> combine. You all may have seen the Sinhala font, but how do I know you if
> you could actually read it? Here is a screen shot someone sent me two days
> back asking me to fix it. I could not help the person, and that is tragic.
>
> https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B0OoSILYvguZZDMzYzE1MDUtMjk2OS00YWI3LTk3NGItMDAyYzY2MmYwNWEy&hl=en_US
>
> The first characters you see in this screen shot is ශ්‌රී. These are two
> letters that should combine to form this letter: ශ්‍රී . Combinations do
> not happen anywhere and it is gibberish for the reader.

There have been a number of components/applications that have mishandled
ZWJ. One particular issue that pops up is some developers think
filtering out ZWJ is a great idea, thereby the ZWJ never reaches the
font lookup stage. Having said that, the example you bring up is
phonetically equivalent though visually distinct. A native Sinhala
speaker would still understand the word.

cya,
#
Received on Wed Jan 11 2012 - 08:36:41 CST

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