Hi John, sorry for the extreme delay in replying to this comment, I hadn’t been keeping up with this blog. Yes, I have heard similar recommendations of reform from the Bangladesh Bangla Academy, which I included above in an edit to the article.
It’s interesting to hear of the metal foundry examples you based Adobe Bengali reph placement on. I just looked up some foundry type books I have and saw that indeed it aligns closer to Adobe Bengali’s placements. So it seems that Adobe Bengali’s reph placement fits closer with a longer historical perspective, but it seems unusual to those of us who have grown up reading post-1981 texts with fixed-distance right-aligned rephs. Your summary of the varying preferences and impossibility of defining a foolproof system is right on. Thanks!

The positioning employed in Adobe Bengali, which is the subject of some criticism in this article, corresponds to that found in metal foundry types, as used by e.g. Ananda Bazar Patrika prior to adoption of the digital Linotype Bengali in the 1980s. I have specimens of these and other metal types in which common letter/conjunct + reph are cast as precomposed ligatures. The reph is positioned above or near to the right-most vertical stem where it connects to the head line, even when that stem is on the left side of the letter as in the two palatal consonants চ and ছ. The exception to this rule is seen in double-letter conjuncts e.g. র্ব্ব, which if shaped as a horizontal ligature carries the reph above the vertical of the first ব rather than the second. This positioning is also observed in numerous historical manuscripts.

I appreciate very much that your article attempts to define a system by which good reph placement may be achieved. I have seen fonts in which the position of reph seems quite random, so any well described system is going to be helpful to font makers in making decisions about reph placement. But there does seem to be more than one viable system, variations between which may reflect regional preferences (Fiona Ross recounts a publisher in Bangladesh requesting changes to the reph positioning in Linotype fonts that publishers in India had approved) as well as familiarity with particular fonts, which in turn may reflect technical limitations of particular typesetting technologies for which they were originally made, e.g. ones in which the reph always sat off the right sidebearing, even for letters like ক.

Thank you very much for your contribution to a discussion and debate that I am sure will continue for a long time!

JH