Re: Tamil C(S)ivamayam

On 11/7/07, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Bala (Sri Lanka) wrote:
>
> > The civamayam is very commonly used in Tamil text. In present days
> > compare to day sign and Tamil number 2, the civamayam symbol used very
> > frequently.  This been used in start of books, almost 90% of the Tamil
> > wedding cards and so on.
> >
> > But when I am looking at the shape I cannot see the difference between
> > Tamil day sign and civamayam.
>
> Neither can I, though both are clearly different from the digit 2.
>
> > (1)    Why there is no code point to the civamayam symbol in Unicode?
> > Is that because of the same/similar glyph?
>
> Perhaps.  Has anyone ever proposed encoding it separately?  Is it
> encoded separately in any other coded character encoding?
>
> > Or Tamils missed out to list to Unicode?
>
> I wouldn't recommend going down this path.
>
> > (2)    Are we expected to use the 0BF3 – Tamil Day sign for civamayam
> > as well?
>
> In American English, the same coded character, U+002E, is used:
>
> * as a sentence terminator
> * as a marker for certain abbreviations
> * as a decimal separator
> * as part of an ellipsis indicating continuation
> * as a separator between parts of a URL or IP address
> * as part of a "dotted leader" in a table of contents
> * and probably for other purposes as well.
>
> If you wish to propose disunifying the civamayam symbol from U+0BF3, you
> will probably need to explain how that situation differs from the U+002E
> situation.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
> NEW E-MAIL -->  dewell at roadrunner dot com
> NEW URL -->  http://home.roadrunner.com/~dewell
> http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ
>
>
>
We can't compare U+002E and U+0BF3. Because, U+002E doesn't have any defined
meaning – it's an ambiguous character (
http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-6.html). Therefore it can be used to
represent anything.

But if you take U+0BF3, it has a defined meaning (The Day sign).

So I don't know whether it is good to use U+0BF3 for Civamayam?

Thanks,

Sarves (Sri Lanka)