I and the Mark That Comes First

The i mark's habit of standing to the left of its consonant is a small thing that has large consequences, and it is worth following them out. For a scribe it means the hand has to know the whole syllable before it commits the first stroke, because the mark cannot be added afterwards without crowding. For a typesetter it means the sequence in which the sorts are set is not the sequence in which the sounds are said, which is one of the reasons Indian scripts were slow and expensive to cut in metal. For a computer it means that the order in which characters are stored and the order in which they are drawn are different problems, and every modern rendering engine for Brahmic scripts has to carry logic that reorders a mark like this one before it can put a syllable on a screen.

Ranjana adds a further difficulty of its own, because it has no Unicode allocation at all, so there is no standard sequence for anything in it to be reordered from. Text that appears to be Ranjana on a screen today is usually Devanagari or Newa characters displayed through a Ranjana typeface, a workaround that gets the shapes onto a page and stores something other than what is shown. That is worth knowing when a reader meets the script online, because the letter they see and the letter the file holds may not be the same letter at all.