Perhaps this is better asked privately to Suzanne McC., but I'm wondering
whether other Indic scripts have similar problems, so that when a
satisfactory method of keying in Tamil is finally defined, it might also
serve to help with other scripts.

===

Mentions of Uniscribe remind me of how I set up a DOS machine to operate
with any of the ISO8859 character sets (up through 10), although only one
at a time. Codepage 819 offers total Latin-1 compatibility, although the
nice box-drawing graphics like those starting at U+2500 are sacrificed.
Doing so did require installing a few custom-modified commands; the work
was done by Kosta Kostis.

Earlier, while reading the Early Music list, and being repeatedly
disappointed at the mangling of European names in ASCII, I tried
installing Codepage 850, and was unhappily surprised and disappointed. Web
searching led me to Alan Flavell's essays about the quest for the elusive
Codepage 819, and the adventure began. Apparently, Codepage 819 was
created for IBM's minicomputers, maybe the AS/400.

Later on, I became hooked on installing all the foreign-language support
(although not fonts!) I could get from Microsoft; I might yet install Win
2K Pro (if it's not too great a security risk), and will likely enjoy
more, or easier, access to other scripts and languages.

As a consequence of politely pestering Opera Software to extend beyond
Latin-1, I learned about RichEdit and various Uniscribes, as well as WGL4,
Core Fonts, and Arial Unicode (which, btw, was recently still available at
an obscure Web site). I've long known about, and read material by, Jukka
Korpela, Alan Wood, Roman Czyborra, Markus Kuhn, and others equally worthy
of mention. Along the way, I came across SC Unipad and Yudit, both very
nice polylingual editors.

In general, it seems that both entering and properly rendering South and
Southeast Asian scripts is the last major language category to become
workable for many people.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Bitstream Vera: very good-looking screen (and more?) font [family]
Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2