[OLPC India] Devanagari Effort

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 01:20 +0530, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Sayamindu/Joshua,
>  
> We appreciate your suggestions/feedback. 
>  
> We are in the process of taking a decision to figure out the best-fit
> solution to position characters on the keycaps.
>  
> There are several classes of choices to make: 
>  
> (A) Keep everything aligned horizontally and vertically or introduce
> an offset that will allow for larger glyphs.
>  
> (B) Always vertically align to the horizontal stroke of the character,
> leaving space above the stroke for those characters that have marks
>      above or make a slight modification by sliding the character up
> vertically when there is no mark, again making it possible to use
> larger
>      glyphs. 
>  
>  

I had a look at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Devanagari_Keyboard and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi1.png (vertical alignment, no
horizontal alignment) seemed to be the most visually appealing to me. 

However, this kind of glyph alignment may be difficult to implement in
certain cases (eg: what if character aa, U0906 needs to be combined with
vowel sign ii, U0940 ?)

Between horizontal and vertical alignment (or no alignment all), I would
suggest that more importance be given to vertical alignment, since our
writing system makes to mandatory to align all our glyphs in line with
the top horizontal bar present in most of the characters.

In such a situation, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi3.png is should
be avoided http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi2.png seems to be the
safest option.


Warm regards,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings