From indic at unicode.org  Tue May 15 08:20:14 2018
From: indic at unicode.org (p phul via Indic)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2018 14:20:14 +0100
Subject: Gurmukhi 'ikonkaar'
Message-ID: <201805151320.w4FDKMV4013046@unicode.org>

I am (as a sikh) concerned about the gurbani ?ikonkaar? symbol in Gurmukhi fonts ? why is not possible to have a correct form of this symbol so important to us and was to our gurus ?
Attached file shows the correct shape (I am sure you are aware of it) ? I am an architect engineer and a font maker ? please let me know if I can contribute any thing towards getting this right ?
Unlike arabic script where characters have a (beginning, middle, end, and full character shapes), Gurmukhi letters , half letters and sound symbols always retain their shape and position ? why then the we have to go thru multiple key presses to type a character ?

I think a single key press should bring fourth the required character (in Gurmukhi, a combination of main letter + half letter + single or multiple sound symbols are required to spell a word and do not make a composite character) ?
We are wasting valuable keys by creating partial composite characters (these serve no purpose) ?

I can type Gurmukhi exactly like English (that is each key press produces a character in its own correct position) ?

I would appreciate some clarification/explanation on this ?

regards








Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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From indic at unicode.org  Tue May 15 15:20:05 2018
From: indic at unicode.org (SundaraRaman R via Indic)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2018 01:50:05 +0530
Subject: Gurmukhi 'ikonkaar'
In-Reply-To: <201805151320.w4FDKMV4013046@unicode.org>
References: <201805151320.w4FDKMV4013046@unicode.org>
Message-ID: <CAOORhHoH-ik_eJ92gTJHsfkbbwdwksCsrWBbe1MXCXc4mKojQw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

In Unicode, EK ONKAR is already its own separate character, with code
0A74. It's a full and separate character at the Unicode level, not a
composite built from partial characters.

If it requires multiple key presses in your keyboard and you would
like to change that, you should try and find a different Input Engine
for Gurmukhi that has a single keypress for this character, or contact
the developers of your current input engine.

Similarly regarding the shape of the symbol, the shape displayed in
your computer depends on the font used for the display. So you could
try and find a different Gurmukhi font that displays the character the
way you wish, or similarly contact the designer of the font suggesting
a better design.

Regards,
Sundar



On 15/05/2018, p phul via Indic <indic at unicode.org> wrote:
> I am (as a sikh) concerned about the gurbani ?ikonkaar? symbol in Gurmukhi
> fonts ? why is not possible to have a correct form of this symbol so
> important to us and was to our gurus ?
> Attached file shows the correct shape (I am sure you are aware of it) ? I am
> an architect engineer and a font maker ? please let me know if I can
> contribute any thing towards getting this right ?
> Unlike arabic script where characters have a (beginning, middle, end, and
> full character shapes), Gurmukhi letters , half letters and sound symbols
> always retain their shape and position ? why then the we have to go thru
> multiple key presses to type a character ?
>
> I think a single key press should bring fourth the required character (in
> Gurmukhi, a combination of main letter + half letter + single or multiple
> sound symbols are required to spell a word and do not make a composite
> character) ?
> We are wasting valuable keys by creating partial composite characters (these
> serve no purpose) ?
>
> I can type Gurmukhi exactly like English (that is each key press produces a
> character in its own correct position) ?
>
> I would appreciate some clarification/explanation on this ?
>
> regards
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
>
>


From indic at unicode.org  Tue May 15 23:02:52 2018
From: indic at unicode.org (Mike Maxwell via Indic)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2018 00:02:52 -0400
Subject: Gurmukhi 'ikonkaar'
In-Reply-To: <CAOORhHoH-ik_eJ92gTJHsfkbbwdwksCsrWBbe1MXCXc4mKojQw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <201805151320.w4FDKMV4013046@unicode.org>
 <CAOORhHoH-ik_eJ92gTJHsfkbbwdwksCsrWBbe1MXCXc4mKojQw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <78e03bec-1b14-1838-fb0e-5291c910b33b@umiacs.umd.edu>

On 5/15/2018 4:20 PM, SundaraRaman R via Indic wrote:
> In Unicode, EK ONKAR is already its own separate character, with code
> 0A74. It's a full and separate character at the Unicode level, not a
> composite built from partial characters.
> On 15/05/2018, p phul via Indic <indic at unicode.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> We are wasting valuable keys by creating partial composite characters (these
>> serve no purpose) ?

I know nothing about the Gurmukhi script, but I was involved in the 
DARPA Tides Surprise Language exercise in 2003, and we ran into partial 
Hindi characters back then.  These were definitely not Unicode, rather 
they were an 8-bit encoding of pieces of characters; to form a full 
character, one often (maybe always?) had to put two or more pieces 
together.  It would be something like forming the Latin character 'd' 
out of a 'c' + a 'l', and form a 'b' out a 'l' and a backwards 'c'. 
Most of these pieces were used in multiple characters, and the purpose 
of doing it this way seemed to be to cram a large number of characters 
into a small number of code points.

We were dealing with corpora as we found them on the web, so we didn't 
deal with they keyboards, but I can imagine that it would have taken two 
keystrokes to form a single character out of two pieces.

As Sundar says, a modern Unicode font should require none of this; each 
character in the font (or each glyph, but that's getting a bit 
technical) should be a fully formed character, and probably only one 
keystroke would be needed for each character (maybe apart from 
diacritic-like characters like the bindi or visarga).  I'm quite 
surprised if these old 8-bit fonts are still around; I thought they died 
out a decade ago.  I haven't run into web pages that use them (unless 
you have the right font installed on your computer, such web pages will 
look like gibberish).

A couple sites that point to Unicode Gurmukhi fonts (although beware, 
some of the links are perhaps broken, and my experience is that some 
sites purporting to serve up fonts have malware--update your virus scan 
before you go looking):
    http://www.gurbanifiles.org/unicode/
    http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Gurmukhi.html
The latter site shows samples of some fonts--you'll notice that some 
fonts are much prettier than others!
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "My definition of an interesting universe is
    one that has the capacity to study itself."
          --Stephen Eastmond