Veer Jee, the reason for the different lagamatra and the circle is because of Unicode conversion problems, Unicode has a lot of problems with these akhars.
Just to clarify, I think the one in the STTM is the shudh Paath as written in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Jee.
We discussed pronunciation of halant briefly in this thread: [
gurmatbibek.com]