The Unicode Technical Committee has posted a new issue for public review and comment. Details are on the following web page:Although I don't know much about Bengali, my work on Hebrew and other languages leads me to think of other possible options beyond the four described in this document, which should be considered seriously if changes to the existing encoding model are being considered.
http://www.unicode.org/review/
Review periods for the new item closes on June 8, 2004.
Please see the page for links to discussion and relevant documents. Briefly, the new issue is:
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30 Bengali Khanda Ta (Closes 2004.06.08)
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The option < ta, ZWJ, virama > is mentioned in the document, but dismissed without proper argument although it would seem to me that this is a far more logical encoding than < ta, virama, ZWJ >. After all, the character in question can easily be understood as a ligature of ta and virama, but certainly not as ta followed by a ligature of virama with the following character. While I can understand the objection that this "involve[s] innovations into the general Indic encoding model", there does come a time when such innovations are preferable to kludges of the existing model. A recent UTC decision has removed the objection to this encoding that ZWJ should not be used within a combining character sequence.
Another alternative which should be considered is use of a variation selector. These were apparently designed for situations like this where two characters are graphically distinct and perceived by the user community as distinct, but also have an underlying unity which should be preserved. In one sense this can be considered as like a new character, thus meeting the user community preference for model D, but it also meets the last objection to this model.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
