Gurmukhi 'ikonkaar'

[Mike Maxwell via Indic]

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