suzmccarth wrote:

> India has a literacy rate of 52% and people are discussing encoding
> game pieces and race horses and ancient and private scripts, but not
> the syllables of the languages of India?

The major writing systems of India are already encoded. If people want to develop
mechanisms to input text as visual syllables, they can do so on top of the existing
encoding. There is no single, determinative relationship between an encoded character and
a keyboard or other input method. I have made keyboards in which a single keystroke =
multiple characters = single glyphs, and others in which multiple keystrokes = single
characters = multiple glyphs, etc. There is no reason at all why the encoding model for a
script should be obvious to users or, indeed, why they should even give it a thought.
Their relationship is with the input (e.g. keystrokes) and the output (glyphs), not the
processing (characters).

John Hudson

--

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

Currently reading:
Typespaces, by Peter Burnhill
White Mughals, by William Dalrymple
Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, by Colette Sirat