DHARMMA and SVA in Grantha

Shriramana Sharma samjnaa at gmail.com
Sun Jul 10 22:28:56 CDT 2016


1)

The text you provide reads DHA + MA + MA + REPH. Obviously however the
word intended is DHARMMA. Perhaps there was a horizontally-fused
ligature of the two MA-s in the original inscription and due to
absence of such a glyph in printing they have approximated thus. You
will have to check the original.

If in fact in the original the two MA-s are separate and somehow
intended to be read as a digraph (unlikely in Grantha but sometimes
seen in Malayalam) then there is no other go in Unicode but to compose
it as DHA + MA + RA + VIRAMA + MA though it may go against your gut
feeling of what the content is. Unicode encodes orthographic content
and not linguistic content. There is no magic invisible character
sequence to make the RA go beyond the second MA.

If OTOH the original has a horizontally fused pair of MA-s then you
should use the normal and expected sequence RA + VIR + MA + VIR + MA
and use an appropriate font to display such a fused M·MA.

2)

The ligature you point out is not S·VA but it is SH·VA. Unicode does
not mandate that it should be displayed as a ligature or as a stack.
It is up to the font. Choose the font that best represents the style
you want to mimic. Unicode says the sequence C1 + ZWJ + VIR + C2 may
be used to *request* that a ligature be prevented and a stack (in this
case) be used. Again it is up to the font and text shaping engine to
support this.


-- 
Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा



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