Malayalam character classification



So, I was looking at some of the Malayalam rendering bugs we
have open and trying to come up with a set of test cases.

I discovered some strangeness with respect to the handling of 
u/uu/vocalic r - as shown in the attachment if we have:

 ka + h + ya + aa (*)

Then the vowel sign for aa renders, as expected, after the 
ya diacritic.  But on the other hand for

 ka + h + ya + u

The vowel sign for u renders after the ka, which I believe is
wrong. The problem here, I think, is that the u/uu/and vocalic r
are classed as _db but in reformed Malayam they should be 
_dr instead.

In fact, indic-ot-class-tables.c has:

 * FIXME: this is correct for old-style Malayalam (MAL) but not for
reformed Malayalam (MLR)

If I'm correct and the ordering actually needs to be different
for old-style and reformed Malayalam, how do we handle this?

There actually are (as referenced above) different language system
tags for the two varieties, but in the fonts I have, they aren't
used and the font just has the default language system. And
in any case, language system tags aren't meant for identifying
how to use a font, but rather for modifying the features used
for different language.

If there is no good way of telling which ordering behavior is
needed for a particular font, should we switch our tables to
be for reformed Malayalam? That seems to be how the freely
available fonts around are designed...

Thanks for any input,
						Owen

(*) h here represents the D4D - MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA / chandrakkala

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