Position of vedic marks with spacing signs in Kannada and Telugu

[sridatta1]

Similar to issue #19 , the vedic marks need to be attached to the previous syllable

Will apply to all vedic signs

[tiroj]

Hmm. This could get very complicated in the Tiro Telugu font because of the way in which I use both non-spacing mark and spacing non-mark glyphs for postscript consonant forms and vowel signs. Depending on the context of the cluster, at the end of the GSUB processing sometimes the postscript is a mark (the case if preceded by a subscript that is wider the underhang of the postscript relative to the base) and sometimes it is a spacing glyph (the case if kerned to the base). This is to make the GPOS handling of anchor attachment versus kerning easier to manage. If the postscript glyph at the end of the GSUB processing is a spacing non-mark, there is no way to skip it in the anchor attachment of the Vedic marks.

This would all have been a lot simpler if Unicode had allowed for visual ordering of Vedic marks, rather than shoving them to the end of the cluster.

I’ll give some thought to how best to handle this. The Tiro Telugu handling for arbitrary conjunct shaping was really difficult to get right, and I am wary about trying to replace it with what will probably be even more complex if I try to make everything but the base into marks. So I might try contextually moving the Vedic marks closer to the base, so they can be more easily anchored where they need to be.

[tiroj]

The Kannada handling is complicated by the fact that the subscript consonants and postscript signs in Tiro Kannada are not classed as marks at all, since their positioning is handled via kerning rather than mark anchor attachment.