This was a fascinating and very informative read. I spent many a nights toiling over the intricacies of the Devanagari script when I was coding <a href="http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://chime.tv/products/hind2000/ss.shtml</a> as a kid. My biggest take-away was that combining different characters is pretty much required though difficult to implement. If you spell "MItI" and then edited it to "MIttI", I would have to replace the 't' with a special double 'tt' character. Simply adding another 't' character would not suffice.