From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:43:43 -0400
Message-ID: <4e6ca2050907260443r5d1518femb4452a109a1b4cec@mail.gmail.com>
From: Akshat Kumar <akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net>
To: 9fans@9fans.net, quanstro@quanstro.net
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Woes of New Language Support
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> what is the total number of stealth characters like nsa?
> if it'not too unreasonable, it might be good enough to steal part of
> the operating system or application reserved areas.

Any consonant should be able to become a half-consonant,
but only when followed by another consonant. In the TTF
method, character type checking falls out easily. I'm still up
for your suggestion, which if I understand it correctly, is to
take up parts of the unspecified unicode ranges and dedicate
them to half-consonants? You would then have to do this for
Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Gurumukhi (I think), and
perhaps a couple of others. It's the fastest implementation, but
has a couple of set backs:
    (a) it is not homogeneous across all Plan 9 distributions, and
    (b) it diverts from general Unicode standards, and thus, the
    problem of reading texts is still present, as everyone else is
    still using the consonant+virama+consonant sequence as
    opposed to following our self-defined code maps.
One can deal with (a) if dedicated enough to language support
for a billion or so people, but (b) is pretty serious and still presents
us with the same full-stop as before.
If there were some way to map unicode sequences to our self-defined
codes, then that could work in this methodology. kbmap perhaps?


Best,
ak