Encoding

[Dominik Wujastyk]

P.Friedlander at wellcome.ac.uk said:
> 
> Hello
> Not only has every Devanagari font I have ever used has had a different 
> encoding but also every Devanagari font I have seen uses a different 
> encoding.

Yes, but input encoding is, or at least should be, different from font
encoding.  In other words, a well-designed editing or formatting program
should insulate you from the nasty details of the underlying font
layout.  So it should be possible to take a single input text and output
it using this, that, or the other font.  That's what John Smith has
provided with his integration of the Jaisalmer Devanagari with TeX.  Now
one can print one's TeX files in Velthuis or Jaisalmer, without changing
the input file at all.  The input coding is the same for both.

Unfortunately, there are not many "well-designed" text processing
systems around that achieve this ideal of font-encoding-independence,
especially when complex ligatures such as those in Devanagari are
concerned.

Dominik