Kenneth Whistler wrote: > Marco wrote: > [...] > > Looking at the screen, the natural thing to do is to move > to the repha and > > delete it, then move between the a and the ja and insert a half la. > > Actually, I would disagree with this. Trying to select and edit a > repha, or any other mark above or below another letter is a pain, > both to implement and from the point of view of a user trying to > work with selection.
Actually, I did not mention selections: I was thinking at the backspace key. However, I don't think that selecting a non-spacing mark is an impossible task. On my current system I can do it, and it isn't much bigger a pain than selecting any other narrow glyphs, such as i's or apostrophes. > My answer to this is that the natural thing to do is to cursor down > before the na to get an insertion point. Then: > > backspace backspace backspace backspace la virama ja u Are you trying to covertly support my point, with this example!? Eight keystrokes to replace a single character isn't exactly what I would call an efficient solution. You have a six character word, and your solution requires deleting and retyping four of them. At this conditions, it would be simpler to delete the whole words and type it from scratch. > Or, in terms of backing store: > > a ra virama ja -u | na > a ra virama ja | na > a ra virama | na > a ra | na > a | na > a la | na > a la virama | na > a la virama ja | na > a la virama ja -u | na But it is at the graphic level that your solution shows all it weirdness. Have you tried "rendering" these nine steps? I have done this for you (see it also in the attached ALJUN.GIF): 1.1: a ja -u repha | na 1.2: a ja repha | na 1.3: a | repha na 1.4: a ra | na 1.5: a | na 1.6: a la | na 1.7: a l- | na 1.8: a l- ja | na 1.9: a l- ja -u | na By the point of view of the user, many things look totally puzzling here: - In step 1.2, your backspace deletes the ja, but the repha survives, jumping over the cursor and seeking shelter over the na. This is a scene often seen in Tom & Jerry cartoons (cursor is the cat, repha is the mouse, and ja is, of course, the big angry dog). - In step 1.3, you have to backspace (=delete to left) in order to delete the "repha", which is now at the extreme right of the word, and to make a new "ra" appear where you just deleted. - In step 1.7, you have to enter something (virama) to make something disappear (the danda of the la). The glyphic method would require these keys: backspace, left, left, left, half la. It is not only much shorter, it also looks more consistent on screen (see it also in the attached ALJUN.GIF): 2.1: a ja -u repha | na 2.2: a ja -u | na 2.3: a ja | -u na 2.4: a j- | -danda -u na 2.5: a | ja -u na 2.6: a l- | ja -u na The only counterintuitive thing I see is that, in step 2.1, it is not clear whether backspace will delete repha (over ja) or -u (under ja). But this is a general ambiguity, when you allow to delete non-spacing marks. > And I'm done. 8 keystrokes after the cursor down, but more efficient > than trying to mess with selecting the repha. More efficient!? By the way, your method too requires deleting a non-spacing mark (the -u after step 1), and even deleting an invisible mark (the virama after step 3). > I'm not suggesting that this isn't also a possible approach > to implementing > Devanagari editing -- just that the issue of what a user does to > deal with editing existing text, under the current Unicode model, > isn't that big a deal for repha and its ilk. Strictly speaking, the method by which text is edited is not an issue for the Unicode standard at all. I am talking about this here because it is an important implementation issue. Notice that all this stuff doesn't call for any modification in the encoding itself. Or, better said, it only calls for one modification. But this thing has is needed *anyway*, regardless of this discussion. I am talking again about REPHA IN ISOLATION: ISCII has a way of representing it, but Unicode does not. This is needed, even only for encoding didactic texts, and a solution to encode it (with ZWJ, probably) should be found. BTW, I apologize with Arjun for having chosen his name for the examples. But it such a famous name, and it was the only Hindi word containing a repha that I had on the tip of my tongue... Ciao. Marco
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