What would a 'Kartika Fixed' font for Malayalam DO, exactly?

Way back in February of this year, Cibu posted about how (apparently) he thought that the idea of Monospaced fonts for Malayalam was foolish. He said:

May not be.. The real issue is stacked conjuncts. Nobody should/can enforce that one particular conjunct should be there in all monospace fonts. Similarly about which conjunct should not be in it. So both 'സ്ന' and 'സ്‌ന' should occupy same text width (pitch) - which is ridiculous.

Now there are actually several problems of fact in this text, which need to be dispatched first:

• At this point (and as of Unicode 5.0) there are five chillu forms -- on NNA, NA, RA, LA, and LLA -- and not on SA, as his atempted example tries to prove (this is one of the reasons that most users will see two identical strings in the message).
• The documented way to create the Chillu forms in Unicode currently (cf: Unicode 4.0 9.9) is to use U+200d, ZERO WIDTH JOINER -- not U+200c, ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER, which is what his example uses. This is the other reason that the two strings will look the same to most users.
• No one was claiming that a font must support all forms of anything; but of course if a font does not support something then that thing will not show up in the font. If the Chillus are important in Malayalam (and consider the tons of email being sento to Unicode's Indic List that importance can be assumed!), then Malayalam typographers seemingly must include them -- but they are of course not obliged to do anything.

Now on to the conceptual issues. :-)

Back in February of this year when I posted Where are the IE plain text fonts?, I talked a bit about the fact that fixed width fonts were not generally available for complex scripts, and in September of 2005 when I talked about Fonts that are 'fixed-width' even if they do not claim to be, I hinted at the solution but mentioned how fixed width fonts for complex scripts would be a topic for another day.

And in May of this year in The font width is broken? Well, fix it!, I described the solution more explicitly:

Though there are some languages that will never work properly with a fixed width font without a LOT of work and a willingness to sometimes negotiate only cells that line up and not single width per character (kind of like the CJK fonts do, but much more so).

The idea behind a fixed width font for complex scripts is text that lines up, not having a literal one cell per code point. So that if giving a Chillu example like the following use Vista almost RC1 and the Consolas font that everything would line up:

Now everything on the left side lines up, but because the Malayalam is being rendered via the Kartika font (thanks to Uniscribe font fallback), everything on the right does not. A true fixed with font that covered Malayalam (Kartika Fixed?) would somehow plan its glyphs out so that just like East Asian fixed width fonts can line up text, Malayalam could do the same, and display such things in an easy-to-line-up manner.

I imagine that there are developers who would love such a font in Visual Studio given it's Uniscribe support. It can't just be me; there may even be some Malayalam developers who would like to see their code look right despite having Malayalam text within it (in string literals or comments or even methods/properties/class names).

This may be too hard, it may not be cost effective, it may not be worth the effort. But the scenario is a sound one and conceptually it is easy to imagine what such a font would do in these cases. Perhaps a real artisan could make it beautiful!

And if it were a good Malayalam font, it would likely have the chillus in it....

This post brought to you by U+200d, a.k.a. ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER)