suzmccarth wrote:

> Marco,
> Thanks for that explanation.

You're welcome.

> Now that I am looking at Hindi and Punjabi I am surprised at the
> number of different things the virama codepoint seems to do with a
> glyph visually. Its function is to remove the vowel but in Hindi the
> first consonant becomes a half form and in Punjabi the r,h and v are
> subjoined as the second consonant in the conjunct. So the virama
> does both those things besides sometimes appearing as itself?

Correct. The actual virama should never appear in Punjabi text, and almost
never in Hindi. For these two scripts, the code point called "virama" in
Unicode works most of the time as a sort of invisible control character to
form conjuncts.

You can find plenty details about the process of displaying Indic script in
Chapter 9 of the Unicode specification:

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch09.pdf

--
Marco