Burmese Rendering (dots and circles)

[James Kass]

On 2022-08-30 8:15 AM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> That may be inauthentic, in so far as the Tai Laing character is
> 'authentic'.  U+1050 and U+1051 are PA and GA with a diacritic,
> necessary since the sibilant's glyphs started merging with PA and GA
> and seen across many Indic scripts.  U+A9FD is PA with a
> systematic diacritic, forging extra letters needed for Pali from an
> authentic Shan base alphabet.  I'm not sure that there is any real need
> to distinguish the two diacritics.

Authenticity should always be a concern.

A few years back, many users didn't distinguish between "1" and "l", or 
"0" and "O".  I prefer to make distinctions wherever feasible. But it 
isn't my rôle to foist my preferences on other user communities.

In an effort to see what users are doing, I downloaded three OpenType 
Myanmar fonts.  Two of them didn't cover anything from Myanmar 
Extended-A and -B.  But the third, the Padauk font from SIL 
International, has the full repertoire.

In Padauk the three following characters all use the inner circle:
U+105C MYANMAR LETTER MON BBA ၜ
U+1050 MYANMAR LETTER SHA ၐ
U+1051 MYANMAR LETTER SSA ၑ
... and the appropriate characters in the extensions use dots.

SIL International has a sterling reputation and has done wonderful work 
supporting non-Latin writing systems.  In my opinion SIL International 
likely has sufficient contacts within the user community.  I'm inclined 
to follow Padauk's lead.