Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

["Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil)" <muthu@murasu.com>]

Dear Kalyan,

At 12:15 PM 9/16/97 +0000, Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram wrote:

.... snipped ....

>Instead of waiting for Microsoft or Apple to take the lead, why cannot
>we launch ourselves a unicode conformant font, software containing
>English, Tamil and few others ) and have some field testing
>concurrently?
>Can we not adopt the same approach as that of Microsoft and Apple but
>tailored to Tamil? What are the technical hurdles if any?
>

It *is* possible.  You may have seen the Unicode font with Tamil that
I demonstrated at the Singapore conference.  Problem is there are no 
(not that I know of) high-level (i.e. user friendly) tools that'll 
help up do that today.  We need to fiddle a little with some low level
structures to realise a Tamil font with a working glyph substitution 
table.

I'm sure the tool vedors are working on having this implemented in
future revisions - some of them have openly stated that they are.

However, we need to also note that Unicode based *text* has to be 
saved in double-bytes.  Not all shrink-wrapped applications today
do that.  If we want to see Tamil on Unicode encoding, we must 
have/use a Unicode enabled application - which are not that many 
or common today.

anbudan,

~ MUTHU