Yeah, I'm aware, I've been arguing for UAX 29 to handle consonant clusters for a while. The current draft has handling for it: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr

Yeah, I'm aware, I've been arguing for UAX 29 to handle consonant clusters for a while. The current draft has handling for it: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-32.html#Virama http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-32.html#Virama However, given that some Brahmic scripts prefer explicit viramas (Malyalam, also Thai I think), this will probably be restricted to Brahmic scripts where joining is always preferred (even if not possible). I'd been testing UAX 29 stuff out before and Apple seems to follow the spec. For example, Chrome and Firefox seem to do special handling for e.g. flag emoji (distinguishing between regional indicator pairs that render as a flag vs those which don't -- i.e the ones which don't correspond to a country code). But Apple follows the spec rigidly. In particular it does not consider joined consonants to form a single EGC. I could be wrong on that, though.