Dear Stefan and other colleagues,

I am keen to know wherein lies the potential scholarly interest of these endeavors, and how the idea of standardizing can be justified in the case of a given data set, such as the two-dimensional realizations (shall we say "graphetes"?) of the graphemes of any premodern Indic script, which is fundamentally characterized by variation. I am presently reading inscriptions of the time of Devapāla, for instance, and am struck by the fact that there are at least three very different forms of syllable-final <t> (one of which actually lacking any virāma element), two very different forms of śa, etc., occurring in single documents. Why would I ever want to encode such variations, and how could I ever be justified in choosing one particular shape of one particular variant as a 'standard' shape to represent them? Please enlighten me on these questions. I am not asking to be irritating or because I am assuming there is no potential interest and justification. I am asking because I do not know and have seen how much interest the availability of a font with Brahmi characters seems to raise among colleagues.

Thank you.

Arlo Griffiths
EFEO/Jakarta