[Debian-in-workers] Bug#661923: Bug#661923: Reply to Santosh

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Shriramana Sharma <jamadagni at gmail.com> wrote:
> The point is not whether the circle is
> closed or not. The point is that as per the Unicode chart, a circle with
> tail to the right is representing the FRACTION ONE QUARTER and *not* DIGIT
> ZERO. For DIGIT ZERO the glyph must be only a circle (whether closed or not)
> and there should be no tail.

I did not misunderstood you :)

The glyph with Big circle+Small Tail used in current Rachana font is
intentional. And I explained that Malayalam zero used to be written
with this glyph(with small tail) as well as full circle. The designer
is aware of this and chose zero with a small tail. This is not against
Unicode standard and not a bug. The glyphs can have writing styles and
variations. When I discussed this to him recently he said, he does not
have any issues to use full circle zero. Note that the font and glyphs
came to existence even before Malayalam is encoded in Unicode and the
glyph used currently is a result of the research of designer.

Also, the glyph of ONE QUARTER is different. It is small circle +
long tail.  We are aware of that different glyph and it is different
from zero with small tail.  Just a Circle with tail DOES NOT represent
ONE QUARTER. Small circle with long tail is ONE QUARTER. The size
rations of circle and tail matter :). 0, o, ം - We can say all are
circles, but that does not mean anything. am I right? :)

I hope this explanation helped you.

-Santhosh