Re: ZWNJ/ZWJ being shown in Pango HEAD ?

[Stefan Baums <baums u washington edu>]

> dash + Bengali Vowelsign E + Consonant
> 
> and 
> 
> dash + Consonant + Bengali Vowelsign E

In theory, the e mātrā would be rendered on top of the dash in the
former case, but in front of the consonant (and after the dash) in
the latter case.  I would love to find some official Unicode
statement on what to do about this sort of cross‐script
combination, if I had the time.  (But do note that cross‐script
combination is perfectly legitimate and necessary, for even such
basic things as for instance applying an acute accent to a
Cyrillic letter, e.g. хорошо́, which happens all the time in
dictionaries and pedagogic material.)

Yes, you would have visual ambiguity if you want to apply the
mātrā to a space instead of a dash:

   <SPACE, VOWEL SIGN E, KA>

and

   <KA, VOWEL SIGN E>

would presumably look the same, and the former is definitely not
the correct way to encode কে.  Not sure whether that is a problem
of the rendering engine at all: as Deepayan points out, this
should be prevented on the input method side.  The documented way
to enter কে would produce the latter sequence, and for explicitly
entering the former sequence (if we want to make that available in
the normal input method at all), one should choose a key
combination complicated enough that Joe Average User will never
get the idea to use it for কে.

Is there really such a thing as an  ে key on Bengali keyboards?
How many people in Bangladesh / West Bengal use Bengali keyboards
as opposed to English keyboards for entering Bengali?  Or do they
use keyboards with double labelling, or stick special Bengali
stickers on an English keyboard’s key, and then switch layouts on
the software side?  Do people prefer the ISCII ‘logical’ layout,
or the English‐Bengali one where hitting the k key would give you
ক?

Cheers,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington