You can't get away with it that easily. If the standard specifies thatmust
<space, combining mark> should be displayed as an isolated combining
mark, then it would be conformant for a partial implementation to
display this sequence as nothing or as an illegal sequence. But if the
system attempts to display the sequence in a meaningful manner, it
do so according to the standard, i.e. not as dotted circle plus
combining mark.
Are you saying that you'd like to see apps display text according to the
correct behaviour for a given script, or not at all?
I would prefer to see the text displayed according to the standard. In this particular case, I would prefer to see the standard fixed rather than the rendering system. But it is a source of great confusion to everyone when a widely used application does something clearly different from what the standard intends, and yet claims "conformance" even if technically this is correct.
There is clearly a widespread need to display a variety of combining marks in isolation, and with no dotted circle. Unicode defines an encoding for this. Uniscribe apparently does not support this encoding. There is something wrong here.
It seems, from what Srivas (Avarangal) wrote, to be part of the requirement for correct display of Tamil, and perhaps other Indic languages, to be able to display isolated forms of such characters as U+0BC6. If Uniscribe does not support this, even if it is technically Unicode conformant, Microsoft cannot claim to support Tamil and other languages.
I agree, I think. But a claim to support particular scripts or languages surely implies that all characters in that script (or at least in its modern form) are supported. That is not perhaps a Unicode requirement, but at least in the UK a failure here might be a breach of laws on truthful advertising and description of products.I don't think that would be particularly helpful. And I think it's a good thing the conformance requirements don't attempt to define what "not supporting such-and-such characters" means at this level of detail.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
