[INDOLOGY] Font with Brahmi characters

[Stefan Baums]

Dear friends and colleagues,

for those who are interesed, I uploaded a copy of my 2006
article on the encoding of Brāhmī (from the proceedings of
the 2003 World Sanskrit Conference) to the following URL:

   http://stefanbaums.com/tmp/baums_2006.pdf

The formal Unicode proposal was submitted on 9 October 2007
and is available here:

   http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3491.pdf

Brahmi has been an official part of Unicode since version
6.0.0 (released 11 October 2010). Operating system and font
support for the rendering of Brahmi is only now beginning to
catch up.

One important note: My original idea (that I still believe
in) was for a unified encoding for all premodern variants of
the Brāhmī script. The Brāhmī codepoints currently included
in Unicode are recommended for use with ancient Brāhmī from
the beginnings until about the Gupta period (including the
systemic variants of Bhattiprolu and Old Tamil Brāhmī).
Debate is still going on about a possible expansion of the
Brāhmī block to accommodate Central Asian Brāhmī (the
special signs for that in my 2006 article and the 2007
proposal are not currently included in Unicode) and the
premodern ‘transitional scripts.’

All best,
Stefan Baums

-- 
Dr. Stefan Baums
Institute for Indian and Tibetan Studies
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich