From: John Hudson ([email protected])
Date: Thu Jun 07 2007 - 13:58:55 CDT
Eric Muller wrote:
> I think that what Ambarish is telling is us is that what Unicode has
> described as RA_sub (see rule R6 in section 9.1), aka vattu in OpenType,
> should really considered as made of two parts, one stroke for RA and one
> stroke for a halant.
> In everything I have seen from Unicode and OpenType, vattu is viewed as
> an atomic object, and is graphically depicted as two connected strokes.
> Is it common to display a vattu as two disconnected strokes?
No, it is not common, although arguably the floating ^ rakar (vattu) might have originally
derived from a combination of a low-left-to-high-right 'RA_sub' stroke and
high-left-to-low-right halant stroke. Even in manuscript, though, there would have been
little impetus to write them separately: why lift the pen when you don't need to?
It looks to me like what the font in Jeroen's screenshot is doing is representing the
'RA_sub' in a way that will create merged rakar forms on-the-fly. When 'RA_sub' merges
with a letter, it is represented by a single stroke like this. These are most commonly
represented by precomposed glyphs, but it is possible to build them using a stroke like
this, although I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons. In this case, the
problem is that 'RA-sub" does not merge with all letters, and does not merge with
round-bottomed letters like ट. So I consider this diagonal stroke cutting through the
bottom of ट to be an incorrect representation of rakar in this context. It looks to me
like this font simply implements the rakar, by default, as a single stroke, which can be
positioned to create on-th-fly merged rakar forms with most letters but which looks
incorrect with certain letters.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC [email protected] We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 07 2007 - 14:00:41 CDT