Re: ZWNJ/ZWJ being shown in Pango HEAD ?

[Stefan Baums <baums u washington edu>]

On Thursday, 26 February 2004, BNID wrote:

> Similarly encoding with Dash is <Dash, ZWJ, Bengali Vowelsign E,
> Consonant>.

Do you have a page reference to the Unicode Standard for that?
That would be neat.

> But we cannot prevent user entering form like <SPACE, VOWEL SIGN
> E, KA>

That depends.  It’s all up to the input method.  With an English
keyboard, the key sequence [space] [e] [ka] would naturally
generate the character sequence

   <SPACE, LETTER E, LETTER KA>

instead of

   <SPACE, VOWEL SIGN E, LETTER KA>

anyway.  I agree that there is a problem in the case of a Bengali
keyboard with an explicit key for the e mātrā.  But if it really
is the case that Bengali keyboard users are accustomed to enter
the mātrā with that key in the visual order, then some major
reeducation about the Unicode model is called for anyway.  Or,
even better and much more practicable, sufficient ruthlessness in
the input method, such that

   [space] [ে]

on its own just does not do anything.

In general, give users an option to press keys either in visual
order or in logical order.  So they can press

   [ে] [ক]

in the former case and

   [ক] [ে]

in the latter to get the character sequence

   <LETTER KA, VOWEL SIGN E>

Relatedly, for those users who choose the visual method and use
the key sequence

   [ে] [ক] [া]

to enter কো, the input method needs to properly convert that into
the character sequence

   <LETTER KA, VOWEL SIGN O>

Cheers,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington