Solution for Extended Tamil

[James Kass]

On 2024-01-24 4:50 AM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> There doesn't appear to be any Unicode progress beyond L2-10/440
> wherein the South Asian subcommitted opined, in that report,
>
> "Indic rendering engines, for example, will need to know that the
> superscript numbers should be treated as diacritics (that is, in the
> nukta class)."
>
> There was a request for comments from those with implementations, of
> which one response predating the report made it to the document
> register, L2/10-435, from R. Radhakrishnan, Muthu Nedumaran, which
> exhibited elegant rendering using AAT.  (I fear that that's no more
> conclusive than finding a Graphite font that can render the sequences.)
>
> Can we honestly claim that subcommittee report as a finding of fact by
> the UTC?  If we can, that would declare that the correct placement of
> the superscript digit is immediately after the consonant.

Previous contact with Tamil information technology specialists has shown 
that they are intelligent, knowledgeable, resourceful, and practical.  
So I wondered how the users were actually handling this situation.  
Hence the web searches for the competing strings.

If the users considered that placing the superscript at the end of the 
syllable was incorrect and a temporary work-around, we'd expect to see 
this reflected in disclaimers on the various web pages.  If the 
specialists in the user community considered syllable-final superscript 
digits to be wrong and could have made an OpenType solution, we'd expect 
to see notices on the web pages offering a downloadable font for 
'correct' display.  Are there any such notices or disclaimers?

Regarding non-Unicode or PUA solutions, TSCII does not support 
superscript digits.  As for TACE16, got both the TAU-Barathi and 
TAC-Barathi Regular fonts from this web page:
https://www.tamilvu.org/ta/tkbd-index-341488
... there are no superscript digits in these fonts.  (TACE16 maps 
precomposed Tamil syllables to the PUA.  Since TACE16 is visual order, 
if its developers wanted to support Extended Tamil, they could.  Maybe 
there are other TACE16 fonts which support superscript digits.)

பா⁴வம் in TACE16:

U+E291
U+E1F2
U+2074
U+E2E1
U+E2A1
U+E1F0

⁴
⁴


Neither DuckDuckGo nor Google search even find the string without the 
superscript digit.  Maybe these two search engines reject PUA strings, 
or maybe I've done something wrong, like mentioning "ccc=0" in this thread.