[Indic-computing-standards] Re: [Indic-computing-users] Re: Unicode on Prof. RKK's web site

[Keyur S. <key...@ya...>]

--- Karthik Venkatesh <kar...@vs...> wrote:
> >Earlier (couple of weeks ago) I visited RKK's site and
> realized that they have some misunderstanding about Unicode
> standard.
> 
> Keyur, not at all.

No one can challenge Prof. Krishnan's knowledge and contribution in Indian
languages. We have respect for Prof. Krishnan and we are far behind him in
knowledge. Couple of weeks ago I visited the page 
  http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/multi_sys/uni_iscii.html
and found that there is lot of talk about ISCII and Unicode mentioning many
problems including sorting and transliteration. In fact they are not the
problems but Unicode recommends to handle it in different way because it is
not possible to provide general sort order for all languages in a given
script encoding because sort order for languages in a script may differ.
Also, there are many other issues like different ways for representing
characters (e.g., decomposed consonant cluster v/s. precomposed ligature).
Hence the characters in a given text must be normalized to either
precomposed or decomposed character string before performing any operations
like sorting and/or searching.

> In fact, Prof. Krishnan is writing a monograph to document
> the problems of Unicode vis a vis Indian languages. His
> focus will be on the limitations of Microsoft's
> Unicode-based approach to Indic language issues. If anyone
> on this list has specific ideas about what else he should
> tackle in this monograph, please write to him at
> rk...@ac...
> 
> From my own association with him for the last several
> months, I know that he certainly does not reject Unicode
> wholesale. However, he is keen that the Indic developer
> community become aware of, and address the problem areas. I
> am sure his monograph will throw more light on the subject.

This is really appreciable. There are very few people like Prof. Kalyan
Krishnan in India who possess great knowledge and also take deep interests
in promotion of Indian languages. We are looking forward to learn a lot
from his inputs.

- Keyur


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com