--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Ishida" <ishida@...>
wrote:

> > I do notice however that most Indic language sites refer to
> > the syllable as the basic unit - often what is referred to as
> > a letter or character is actually a syllable, this is the
> > basic element.
>
> For an overview (which may answer several of your questions

below) of how

> they work and how that is handled in an encoding like ISCII or

Unicode you

> could read my Unicode technical note:
>
> An Introduction to Indic Scripts

http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn10/ (links

> to a PDF)
>
> (HTML version at
>

http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/indic-overview/Overview.html
for those

> with necessary fonts and rendering equipment)

Thanks for those links. i may have read some of it before when I
was first learning Indic (Tamil and Panjabi input) but now that I
have more experience I will reread it.

>
> Note that to enable keyboard input of Tamil, you need fonts

with appropriate

> rendering information and the Uniscribe dll to bridge between

the characters

> and the presentation forms. A huge benefit of this approach is

that by thus

> separating content and presentation, you can apply different

fonts to

> achieve different approaches to presentation for the same

underlying Tamil

> text.

yes I can see the purpose of this separation after using
MoTaml98

I believe I have enabled the fonts properly in WinXP with the "dll"
(enlighten me) since we can input words and paste into google
and get accurate results from a Tamil language search. Of
course we couldn't do any of that in Tamilword98.

> To create a syllable based encoding seems to me to involve

an extraordinary

> amount of difficulty for developers and users alike, for no

obvious gain.

A higher skill level is required to input in Indic scripts than in
European or Asian scripts.

Suzanne

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: suzmccarth [mailto:suzmccarth@...]
> > Sent: 01 June 2004 07:34
> > To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> > Subject: Re: Unicode Tibetan (Was: syllable level encoding

in unicode)

> >
> > Thanks Nicholas for all your comments.
> >
> > Yes,there are a lot of talented people creating software in
> > India and I notice that there is a lot going on right now. I
> > think some Indic lg. developers are trying to create a
> > software that will approximate syllable level encoding.
> >
> > I do notice however that most Indic language sites refer to
> > the syllable as the basic unit - often what is referred to as
> > a letter or character is actually a syllable, this is the
> > basic element.
> >
> > I started working in Windows 98 with njstar and MoTaml
> > software and found it quite good but when I wanted to put up
> > my multilingual website I bought a Windows XP laptop(the
> > reason for switching from a Mac which I used earlier is sad
> > but too long to revisit) Then I found that the language
> > resources on WinXP was amazingly satisfying until I tried the
> > Indic languages.
> >
> > I have been working with the standard keyboard and that
> > doesn't bother the Chinese and Korean students. In fact, I
> > don't see why Tamil couldn't have a system very like Korean.
> > Actually Tamil has a relatively small repertoire of phonemes
> > which work well on the keyboard but of course are difficult
> > to combine and sequence. Using the on screen visual

keyboard

> > in Windows accessories which switches script with the input
> > language makes all this possible.
> >
> > I don't think the problem is political but maybe more a
> > misunderstanding. Since Indic languages appear to be

written

> > with an "alphabet", they got alphabetic encoding not syllable
> > encoding.
> > My feeling is that Tamil looks like an alphabet and functions
> > like a syllabary.
> >
> > Suz