Missing Saurashtra conjuncts #1

Font

NotoSansSaurashtra-Regular.ttf

Where the font came from, and when

Site: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/blob/af306de71ce51b9ce75389b163026427953606cf/phaseIII_only/unhinted/ttf/NotoSansSaurashtra/NotoSansSaurashtra-Regular.ttf
Date: 2019-04-24

Font version

Version 2.000

Issue

Noto Sans Saurashtra supports the four traditional conjuncts śra, ṣṭha, ṣṭra, and tya. There’s no good reason to have picked just those four. If the font supports any traditional conjuncts, it should support the full set, which uses subjoined consonants with a few pre-base forms. This table (page 9) shows the subjoined forms, including one for kṣa, which it calls ṭṣa. The “Saurashtra: 1902” column of this table has lower quality, but it includes dotted circles so you can tell which glyphs are reordered before the base. Here is a high-resolution page of text using subjoined consonants. Here is a book from 1902. With all these sources, it shouldn’t be hard to support the full repertoire.

There is one more pre-base form, the ꢲꢣ꣄ꢣꢸ ꢫꢒꢬꢪ꣄ haddu yakaram, which means ‘half ya’. “This half yaram denotes the ‘aa’ sound in English words, mat,rat,cat etc.” (source). “Haddu Yakara is a special conjunct sign to denote the geminated /y/ sound . It is a remnant of the old script, being a double conjunct conjunct of /y/. It is placed before the consonant” (source). In the font Pagul, it is formed from <A8C4, A8AB, A8C4, A8AB>. So even though Unicode doesn’t say anything about this character, I think we can assume it should be encoded as two pre-base yas.