| Brief Political History / Development of Sinhala Characters / Evolution of Sinhala Characters / Three Sinhala (Hodiyas) without the Vowel Expansion / Development of Tamil Characters / Tamil Alphabet with the Vowel Expansion / Position of Sri Lanka Standard Institute / Difficulties Relating to the Current Software / Advantages of having a Sinhala and Tamil Character Matrix / Why we need complete Sinhala and Tamil Characters / News Paper Articles / References / Solution / Cartoons /Comments / Save our Language Sinhala/Computer literacy low / Sinhala Grammer & Reading / Some E mail from Linux Group / Catalogue of Palmleaves | |||||
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SINHALA CHARACTER CODES FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE OBJECTIONS (2nd Revision )
Summary of a forum held on 2/11/2004 at SLSI Board Room.
Meeting between the SLSI and Sri Lanka Association of Printers was held on the November 2, 2004 at the SLSI Board Room. A forum of twenty members were present including Prof V M Samaranayake, Members of CSSL, Lake House, ICTA & SLSI. The meeting was conducted by Mr Rohan N Wijeratne. The President of Sri Lanka Association of Printers Mr. Keerthi Gunawardane and I pointed out that the figure one in the SLS 1134 does not contain some of the Sinhala characters. Due to the missing characters absolute locations cannot be derived. Therefore OCR ,SMS, Voice to text software cannot be developed. The SLSI committee said that characters not specified in Figure one are shown in codes and rules. quote from the SLS1134 page 9 ‘The codes for zero-width joiner (ZWJ), which is used to form conjunct letters, and zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ), are not in this code page, but have the values 200D and 200C respectively.” Unquote Refer to http://www.unicode.org/alloc/CurrentAllocation.html This clearly shows that the areas specified in SLS 1134 under 2yyy are named in Unicode as Empty Columns in Assigned Blocks. (Copyrights Unicode coloured in red for better understanding) Examples are given below. Quote from Unicode ‘ 0240..024F 16 [Latin Extended-B] 2090..209F 16 [Superscripts and Subscripts] 20C0..20CF 16 [Currency Symbols] 20F0..20FF 16 [Combining Marks for Symbols] ‘ unquote SLS 1134 is an incomplete Standard because it gives locations in empty columns. For all locations a shape and an absolute address have to be specified. Lake House declared that they have all the characters but this is only for the use of their institution. A copy was handed to the President of the Sri Lanka Association of Printers. The SLSI committee stressed the locations given by the Unicode to Sri Lanka was 128. That Unicode was dictating terms to Sri Lanka about the number of characters. This argument cannot be accepted because the SLSI team was totally unaware of the total number of Sinhala characters. Unicode unconditionally accept the National Standard of a country. Asian Languages have more than thousands of characters which is in the Unicode. Dr Gihan Dias mentioned the possibility of using sub sections to expand the number of characters. I pointed out that the character code has to be redone from the beginning. With the present expansions of Operating System it is possible to have 64,000 characters. This permits to include any variations and opinions of the public. Discussion went on for 2 hours while SLSI took notes. SLSI announced that they would have a private meeting. The end result will be informed later. Donald Gaminitillake Colombo November 5, 2004 |
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