Subscript Manual WA

Richard Wordingham richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com
Sat Feb 20 05:13:20 CST 2021


On Fri, 19 Feb 2021 22:49:12 +0000
Andrew Glass via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> Thank you for the nice examples, Richard.
> Indeed this is up to fonts to enable. Fonts could add a locl feature
> for Sanskrit to enable this example. That would depend on software to
> pass in the OT language tag appropriately. Or, fonts, could simply
> optimize for Sanskrit by default.

The winning argument for this script has been that fonts should
be able to produce something that is not outrageously wrong even in the
absence of language information.  So, the logic should rather be to
disable the character <VIRAMA, WA> only for languages that don't have
it. If I've interpreted the reports correctly, it may turn up in Old
Burmese, but won't turn up in Modern Burmese.

So the logic would be to disable the subscripting of WA if the text
were tagged as being in Modern Burmese, as opposed to Old Burmese, Pali
(TBC) or Sanskrit.  I don't know how Pali in the Shan variant of the
Myanmar script should currently map to OpenType language tags - there
might not even be a BCP 47 tag for it.  I think there are similar
questions for other other local variants of Pali in the script.

There is research to be done into the spelling of the Pali and Sanskrit
clusters with WA as a second element.  I would not be surprised to find
different spellings word/phrase initially and finally.  (I've only seen
Pali 'kv' as the result of sandhi, e.g. of 'ko attho' to 'kvattho'.  It
still needs its own artwork for Pali in the Sinhala script!)

Richard.


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