Dear Charles,
Nice project. Please let us know when the revised font will be
available. Regarding the long ra, I assume you are planning to create a
glyph for the character with a vinculum? (Or is it already there?)
Similarly, the short ra is often written with a macron to avoid confusion.
One may want to include also the lines that are used to cover a pu.l.li
(and thus, restore the vocalization).
Best,
Satyanad K.
Le 16/03/2023 à 11:42, Charles Li via INDOLOGY a écrit :
Hello,
At the TST Project, where we're cataloguing Tamil manuscripts, we've
forked Noto Tamil and started adding old ligatures, like pre-reform
ṇā, ṟā, etc. as well as some ligatures that don't seem to have
appeared before in print, such as the below-base "ma" ligatures. See
this page for examples:
https://tst-project.github.io/editor/entities.html
It's still a work in progress!
Best,
Charles
On 2023-03-16 11:08, Satyanad KICHENASSAMY wrote:
Dear All,
To follow up on Harry Spier's query, the typesetting of the older Tamil
characters (as well as Tamil Grantha) is sometimes problematic. I use Akshar
Unicode for contemporary Tamil, which is very close to the standard printed
characters, but insert some characters from Vaigai for the classical characters
-- that were actually the standard characters when I grew up. For Grantha, the
e-Grantamil font is nice even though less close to the characters in print, but
the ligatures are sometimes undone automatically, for reasons that I do not
understand. Also, I gather it is encoded in the same segment as Bengali, which
is another source of confusion. The final output can be fine, though, see
examples in the following paper:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_2018_num_162_4_96658
This being said, if there is a better solution, I would be interested.
For a diplomatic edition, it would be nice to have fonts that contain as many
variants as possible. Similarly, Southern Sanskrit manuscripts should be
reproduced in their original script if possible, especially in diplomatic
editions. For instance, va and ba in printed Grantha are easier to disinguish
than in Nagari (this is also true in those palm-leaf mss that I have used).
I remember seeing proposals arguing that some characters usually encoded in Unicode as ligatures in
Indic language fonts should be treated as stand-alone glyphs, at least in Tamil. The reason is that
you sometimes see letters such as "mo" rendered as "kompu-(blank in a dotted
circle)-lengthening mark-ma" which is of course nonsense. The placement of diacritics is also
misleading at best, as was pointed out on this list a few days ago. This is in addition to the
issues raised by Jean-Luc Chevillard (for instance, the ர் cannot be written without the lower
diagonal stroke on some fonts).
Of course, whether one decides to overlook the differences in variants of one
character always involves judgment. An extreme example would be the different
versions of the character 之 in the famous calligraphy 蘭亭集序 Lántíngjí Xù by 王羲之
Wáng Xīzhī. For India, the விநாயகர் சுழி vinaayakar cu_li has slightly
different forms depending on writers, some of which may be worth recording
(recall that this symbol is a form of the pra.nava; the same issue could be
raised about the pra.nava in other scripts).
Best,
Satyanad Kichenassamy
On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:33:42 -0400
Harry Spier via INDOLOGY<[email protected]> wrote:
Received thanks to Victor Davella
Harry Spier
On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 1:21 PM Harry Spier<[email protected]>
wrote:
Can someone recommend a good free unicode font for modern Tamil. I.e.
provide a link to download this.
Thanks,
Harry Spier
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Professeur des Universités
LMR (CNRS, UMR9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web:http://phare.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
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