Archive
Everything on the site, in four sections
Thirteen pieces. The front page carries a handful; this is the rest of them.
Section 1 · Code Points
One code point, then thirty years
- 01One code point, and then thirty years of arguing about what to drawAssigning a character a number is the easy half; agreeing what shape it takes in every context is the part that took decades.
- 02Languages in the Eighth Schedule, written in a handful of scriptsThe constitutional list of languages maps onto far fewer writing systems, which is what made a shared table thinkable.
- 03Three rows of the Devanagari block, sixteen to a rowThe block's layout is a design decision with consequences for sorting, input and every font built since.
Section 2 · Shaping
The head-line problem, and the layer built to solve it
- 01The head-line problem, and the layer built to solve itThe connecting bar above Devanagari means glyphs cannot simply be placed side by side, which is why a shaping engine exists at all.
- 02Conjuncts, and vowels that moveA matra typed after a consonant may render before it, so the visual order and the storage order are deliberately different.
- 03The first faces most systems shippedA small number of fonts carried Indic rendering for years, and their metrics still show up in unexpected places.
Section 3 · Standards
Ten scripts, one table
- 01ISCII put ten Brahmi-derived scripts on one code tableA single eight-bit table for ten scripts was an elegant answer that Unicode then had to reconcile with everything else.
- 02What Unicode had to settleMerging a national standard into a universal one is a negotiation about which distinctions survive.
- 03What a state standardises when it standardises a keyboardA layout decision fixes what is easy to type for a generation.
Section 4 · Procurement
Then somebody had to write it into a purchase order
- 01Then somebody had to write it into a purchase orderProcurement is where a standard becomes a deployment, and the documents are public.
- 02BOSS, built at C-DACA state-funded distribution with localisation as its reason for existing, and a documented deployment history.
- 03The school deploymentsPutting one distribution in front of millions of students is a procurement decision with a measurable footprint.
- 04Patches going the other wayContribution back to the kernel is public and countable in the mailing-list archives.