Burmese Rendering (dots and circles)

[Richard Wordingham]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:09:50 +0000
James Kass via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> 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.

I would wonder though about their contacts for Sanskrit, and for that
matter, Pali, community.  I seem to be the one who alerted them to the
fact that they'd overlooked the DD.DDHA conjunct.  Despite the
statement in TUS and in the 2006 submissions to the TUC from Michael
Everson and Martin Hosken, the Padauk font declines to support <U+1039
VIRAMA, U+101D WA>.  The Sixth Council text of the Tipitaka, or at
least, something declaring itself to be such, is printed using a
triangular WA for the conjuncts, even in words like အနွာဿဝေယျုံ
anvāssaveyyuṃ (Verse 213 in the Dighanikaya, available at
https://www.pali-text-images.net/cst/02-suttantapitaka/06-dighanikaya-1-cst.pdf),
so I suspect negative feedback is limited, and besides, Padauk by
default provides a round glyph for MEDIAL WA.

Some of the minority characters, especially for Pali, do not seem to be
robustly supported.  (There's also the difficult question of whether a
letter is actually a single character or a cluster.)  Thus, the range
of glyph variation will be unknown, and I strongly suspect that many of
the regional Pali characters are actually recent inventions.

Richard.