[HarfBuzz] dotted circle is not appearing for dependant vowel

[Harshula]

On Tue, 2012-07-24 at 14:18 +0100, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> In general, I think the Indic shaper should *not* insert dotted circles. 
> The one exception that I think may be desirable would be the case of 
> left-reordrant matras when no usable base character (either consonant or 
> vowel letter, or other "placeholder" such as an explicit U+25cc or a 
> space, no-break space, etc) can be found. In this case inserting a 
> dotted circle (or a space?) to act as the base, and then reordering the 
> matra to the left of it, may be the best option, so that a "visually 
> encoded" sequence िक does not appear identical to the correctly-encoded कि.

1) You've identified the need for the inclusion and exclusion of the
dotted circle.

2) The dotted circle a great way to easily identify encoding errors,
generated by broken input-methods/OSs, in scripts/languages that I can
comprehend.

3) There are circumstances where the dotted circle is not desirable. For
example, when explaining orthography rules, the dotted circle is an
absolute visual nuisance. IIRC, Pango used to get the dotted circle
glyph from any font, however, ICU would try to get it from the font
being used. Hence with ICU, you could use a font without the dotted
circle glyph to avoid it in presentations.

4) So, how do we move forward? Can we suppress the dotted circle by
including some special Unicode codepoint before the dependent vowel? I
want the dotted circle to be the default and have an option to suppress
it when required.

cya,
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