Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> suzmccarth wrote:
> > Well I can't post a 2 line link so follow Tamil to the Tamil
> > syllable chart - this is what my students are telling me is the
> > Tamil writing system. It is a 12 x 18 array.
>
> 12 x 18 = 216
>
> 12 + 18 = 30
>
> Which solution did you say was better? :-)
>
> IMHO, what the users think about they writing system is quite irrelevant
> when designing a computer encoding for that writing system. Unduly taking in
> consideration user thoughts brought Unicode to make the engineering *error*
> (again, IMHO) of encoding Ethiopic and Cherokee as if they were katakana
> (not to mention the 70,000+ Chinese "characters" which could have been
> avoided with a "composing radicals" approach).

Cherokee _is_ -- you must've meant Cree. But do you want your typography
subsystem to have to rotate characters? Rotating seems to be a very
memory-intensive procedure.

> What the users think or do not think only becomes important when designing
> *user* *interfaces* (in this case, keyboards and their software
> counterpart), i.e. the part of computer systems which users will interact
> with.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...