Yves Codet wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I am encoding a short Sanskrit treatise on phonetics and I need a 
> Devanagari character, the ardhavisarga, which does not exist in the 
> current version of Unicode. I can see on the Unicode pipeline table:
>     0C71 TELUGU SIGN ARDHAVISARGA (reproposed as VEDIC SIGN 
> ARDHAVISARGA), 2006-Aug-11 Accepted, 2007-Oct-18 Stage 1
> I am not sure I understand what this means: the character is accepted as 
> VEDIC SIGN ARDHAVISARGA but 0C71 is the code point which was proposed 
> for the (rejected ?) TELUGU SIGN ARDHAVISARGA, so I assume that VEDIC 
> SIGN ARDHAVISARGA has no code point yet. Am I right? And sorry if the 
> preceding question is not directly related to TEI; the following is. 
> What provisional encoding would you recommend in such a case? Thanks in 
> advance.

Hi Yves,

To answer your second question first, where a character is either so new to 
Unicode that it won't appear in any fonts yet (in the correct place) or 
doesn't exist in Unicode, I would use the TEI gaiji module to describe it 
and reference it with the <g> element.  I'm sure you've already looked at:

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/WD.html

In your case I'm guessing that something along the lines of:

<charDecl>
  <glyph xml:id="ardha01">
   <glyphName>VEDIC SIGN ARDHAVISARGA</glyphName>
   <mapping type="standardized">?</mapping>
   <mapping type="unicode">U+0C71</mapping>
  </glyph>
</charDecl>

and reference it with <g ref="#ardha01"/>  But that doesn't help if you 
want to reference both. (Though I'd just do the similar thing for the 
TELUGU, but without the unicode mapping.)

However, that doesn't really answer your first question.  What I guess it 
means is that the TELUGU SIGN ARDHAVISARGA was rejected for some reason and 
instead this has been replaced (on the same code point) with the VEDIC SIGN 
ARDHAVISARGA but that this hasn't been accepted yet either.  All very 
confusing!  Ask on a unicode mailing list maybe?

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk