Response to Arasan's Comments

[George Hart <ghart@socrates.berkeley.edu>]

Obviously, in an ideal world (soon?), we will encode Tamil based on its
character set.  That will, among other things, allow us to do proper
sorting.  Unfortunately, there's no way to do that at present, short of a
specialized program (such as Muthu's anjal system, and my own now defunct
Indian Text Editor).  Meanwhile, we need a standard, which, given the state
of things, must be one-level, i.e. one-to-one correspondence between what
you type and what appears.  When the two-stage system is generally
available, I'll be the first to adopt it!  Note that in a one-stage system,
you to write "ke," you write the sign for "e" and then for "k", as that is
the order in which the signs glyphs in Tamil.  When we get a 2-stage
system, you will write "k" and then "e", and it will come out right (as in
anjal).  But until that time, we need a standard.  G. Hart