[INDOLOGY] Unicode font for ancient and modern Tamil

[Satyanad KICHENASSAMY]

Dear All,

To follow up on Harry Spier's query, the typesetting of the older Tamil characters (as well as Tamil Grantha) is sometimes problematic. I use Akshar Unicode for contemporary Tamil, which is very close to the standard printed characters, but insert some characters from Vaigai for the classical characters -- that were actually the standard characters when I grew up. For Grantha, the e-Grantamil font is nice even though less close to the characters in print, but the ligatures are sometimes undone automatically, for reasons that I do not understand. Also, I gather it is encoded in the same segment as Bengali, which is another source of confusion. The final output can be fine, though, see examples in the following paper:

https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_2018_num_162_4_96658

This being said, if there is a better solution, I would be interested. 

For a diplomatic edition, it would be nice to have fonts that contain as many variants as possible. Similarly, Southern Sanskrit manuscripts should be reproduced in their original script if possible, especially in diplomatic editions. For instance, va and ba in printed Grantha are easier to disinguish than in Nagari (this is also true in those palm-leaf mss that I have used). 

I remember seeing proposals arguing that some characters usually encoded in Unicode as ligatures in Indic language fonts should be treated as stand-alone glyphs, at least in Tamil. The reason is that you sometimes see letters such as "mo" rendered as "kompu-(blank in a dotted circle)-lengthening mark-ma" which is of course nonsense. The placement of diacritics is also misleading at best, as was pointed out on this list a few days ago. This is in addition to the issues raised by Jean-Luc Chevillard (for instance, the ர் cannot be written without the lower diagonal stroke on some fonts).

Of course, whether one decides to overlook the differences in variants of one character always involves judgment. An extreme example would be the different versions of the character 之 in the famous calligraphy 蘭亭集序 Lántíngjí Xù by 王羲之 Wáng Xīzhī. For India, the விநாயகர் சுழி vinaayakar cu_li has slightly different forms depending on writers, some of which may be worth recording (recall that this symbol is a form of the pra.nava; the same issue could be raised about the pra.nava in other scripts).

Best,

      Satyanad Kichenassamy

On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:33:42 -0400
Harry Spier via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Received thanks to Victor Davella
> Harry Spier
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 1:21 PM Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Can someone recommend a good free unicode font for modern Tamil. I.e.
> > provide a link to download this.
> > Thanks,
> > Harry Spier
> >


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Satyanad KICHENASSAMY
Professor of Mathematics
Laboratoire de Mathematiques (CNRS, UMR 9008)
Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
F-51687 Reims Cedex 2
France
Web: https://www.normalesup.org/~kichenassamy
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