[Bug 484536] various smc-fonts have wrong default glyphs

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=484536





--- Comment #1 from Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com>  2009-02-08 04:04:21 EDT ---
The following code points were added to Unicode 5.1 by Unicode consortium
0D7A MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU NN(ണ്‍)
0D7B MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU N(ന്‍)
0D7C MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU RR(ര്‍)
0D7D MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU L(ല്‍)
0D7E MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU LL(ള്‍)
0D7F MALAYALAM LETTER CHILLU K(ക്‍)
Please note that these glyphs are already present in Malayalam(ml_IN) fonts and
mapped to
ണ +  ്  + zwj,
ന + ് + zwj
ര + ്  + zwj
ല + ്  + zwj
ള + ് + zwj
ക + ് + zwj
respectively.
Large amount of data encoded using this standard(5.0) is present in digital
format. By duplicating the encoding by defining new code points for these
glyphs, Unicode brought dual encoding issue for
Malayalam. Dual encoding without canonical equivalence brings chaos to Unicode
Malayalam including security issues. And it makes existing application buggy
while handling Malayalam. So accepting these code
points to our application should be done with extreme care. We should keep
backward compatibility and at the same time we should avoid dual encoding.
There are two options:

a) Unicode consortium should define canonical equivalence between the existing
representation and newly defined duplicate code points
b) Unicode consortium should deprecate the new code points(this is recommended,
since the new code points does not bring any advantage other than issues to
existing data and application both in technical
and security aspects )

It is because of this reason , Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC), the FOSS
developer community which develops/maintains these fonts decided to postpone
adding these glyphs to fonts(Not only to fonts,
but existing applications too) until Unicode resolve the above mentioned
issues. SMC had already informed Unicode about the problems by the document No:
L2/08-038. You can see a copy here
http://wiki.smc.org.in/images/2/23/SMC_Unicode_5.1.pdf. If this bug is a
serious concern for you, you may also contact Unicode consortium to resolve the
issue asap.

 Unicode 5.1 compliance means backward compatibility to 5.0 and older versions
also. If we want to keep backward compatibility we should keep the existing
glyph-code-point mapping. At the same time if we
duplicate those glyphs for another code point in the font, that is a serious
issue.

This bug should postponed till Unicode take any decision on this problem.

Regarding other new code points in Unicode 5.1 version,  we are planning to add
those glyphs to fonts in their next versions(No font in Malayalam has those
glyphs as of now). The R sign in the unassigned
code point positions will be removed as and when Unicode defines characters for
them in future.

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