Normally, we attach the Halant to the previous character and move it
with it. For after-base consonants however, the Halant "belongs" to the
consonant after, so attach it so.
This fixes Bengali sequences involving post-base consonant Ya, which
should ligate with the Halant to form Ya Phala, but previously a
reordered matras was blocking the ligation.
Seems like this is what Uniscribe is doing, and does not break any fonts
we tested (with Devanagari, Malayalam, Khmer, and Bengali), while fixing
some Ra Phala sequences for Bengali with Vrinda. Fixes another 2% of
Bengali failures (a couple more to go).
The spec says: "[{M}+[N]+[H]]", and that's what Uniscribe implements.
We instead do: "{M+[N]+[H]}", which means we allow Nukta and Halant
after all Matras, not just the last one. It makes more sense.
In the case of Consonant,LeftMatra,Halant, Uniscribe leaves the Halant
where it is, but we want to move it with the Matra as that makes more
logical sense.
U+0985 BENGALI LETTER A followed by U+09D7 BENGALI AU LENGTH MARK.
According to Bobby de Vos on the mailing list, this results in a dotted
circle with most shaping engines, but is a legitimate sequence in this
minority language.
We reached the consensus on the list to NOT implement dotted-circle
in HarfBuzz.
Behdad Esfahbod