Indian scripts
eas...@absamail.co.za
'the basic vowels', 'consonants', 'vowel extensions or medial vowels',
and other irrelevant terms.
Since a person would be able to "copy type", without being able to
read and understand, these terms (above) are irrelevant to my questions.
In fact a computer could use character recognition to copy script off of
paper into a computer's memory.
Because I don't know even how the Indian scripts are formed, I
didn't understand much. I have great difficulty in getting answers from
India; even to find some one who will answer 3 questions instead of
just TOP-posting a general remark to the last question.
My final aim is explained in the PS. which is not needed to answer
my questions.
Q 1: Approximately how many keys do they have (in Mysore = Kanataka) ?
Or other languages ?
Q 2: Is it true that the 'carriage' does not step-on (like latin typewriters)
but that you often over-write a glyph or even step back ?
Q 3: If you 'overwrite' the firstly-positioned glyph by a wrong
second-added glyph, do you need to erase the whole position;
ie. both glyphs, or can you just erase the second/faulty glyph ?
Here I'm talking about a computer.
eg. imagine that I want to write char: "p", which is specified
(by the system designer) to be the "o" glyph followed by the
'backspaced' "l", which must also be 'dropped down'.
If I position the "l" wrongly, to get a "q", can I just reposition
(erase and replace) the "l", or must I erase the "o" as well.
(PS. my present font shows "l" and "o" as an oval and a vertical line
perhaps yours looks different.)
Thanks for any answers, also emailed to: eas...@absamail.co.za
-- Chris Glur
PS. In case you're interested:
I use (mostly) the free-ware, multi-tasking, single user
Oberon S3 operating system from the ETH (university) in Switzerland
(the home of Prof. Wirth , the designer of the Pascal family of
languages). It is compact runs fast on 386 up, with 4 Mb RAM, and would
be ideal on reduntant computers from the west for Indian schools.
The existing font editor could be used by some school kids to write
up to 256 shapes/glyphs.
And then we could think how to handle the overwriting and
'moving back' facility.
Obviously it must follow some existing standard.
My main interest is Malayalam, since I'm thinking of semi-retiring to
Kerala; employing a few people on some software/hardware projects.
Alan
> Because I don't know even how the Indian scripts are formed, I
> didn't understand much. I have great difficulty in getting answers from
> India; even to find some one who will answer 3 questions instead of
> just TOP-posting a general remark to the last question.
I don't know about Indian scripts, but I do know about Thai, which is based on Sanscrit, so it may be of some
help. My answers will refer to Thai, but I believe much would apply to Indian scripts.
> Q 1: Approximately how many keys do they have (in Mysore = Kanataka) ?
> Or other languages ?
Thai has 46 letters, but also another dozen markers, and also their own decimal figures (though European style
figures are more common now)
There is no upper or lower case, or different forms depending on context (as in Arabic). Traditionally there
was no punctuation, but now European style is often used. I think you can fit most similar scripts comfortably
into one byte (256) sets.
> Q 2: Is it true that the 'carriage' does not step-on (like latin typewriters)
> but that you often over-write a glyph or even step back ?
Sometimes you need to put an "accent" mark above or below one of the alphabetic characters. Probably wouldn't
need to step back.
> Q 3: If you 'overwrite' the firstly-positioned glyph by a wrong
> second-added glyph, do you need to erase the whole position;
> ie. both glyphs, or can you just erase the second/faulty glyph ?
> Here I'm talking about a computer.
Dunno, but I suspect you can erase separately.