Akhand ligatures have the highest priority and are formed first some languages include them in their alphabetsĪl-lakuna (halant/virama) – The character used after a consonant to suppress its inherent vowelīase glyph – Any glyph that can have a diacritic mark attached to it. The following terms are useful for understanding the layout features and script rules discussed in this document.Īkhand ligature – A required consonant ligature that may appear anywhere in the syllable and may or may not involve the base glyph. While it does not contain instructions for creating Sinhala fonts, it will help font developers understand how the Sinhala shaping engine processes Sinhala text. It contains information about terminology, font features and behavior of the Sinhala shaping engine. This document targets developers implementing shaping behavior compatible with the Microsoft OpenType specification for the Sinhala script.
Moving forward, developers should refer to this new specification.
NOTE: Starting in Windows 10, Sinhala will be supported by the Universal Shaping Engine rather than a stand-alone shaping engine. It is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit. The Sinhala script is used to write the Sinhala language. This document presents information that will help font developers in creating OpenType fonts for Sinhala script as covered by the Unicode Standard 6.0.
