Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange

Last updated

Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing the Tamil script. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are TSCII-specific. After long years of being used on the Internet by private agreement only, it was successfully registered with the IANA in 2007. [1]

Contents

TSCII encodes the characters in visual (written) order, paralleling the use of the Tamil Typewriter. Unicode, instead, uses the logical order encoding strategy for Tamil, following ISCII, in contrast to the case of Thai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered by TIS-620 was adopted.

The government of Tamil Nadu endorses its own TAB/TAM standards for 8-bit encoding and other, older encoding schemes can still be found on the web.

The free etext collection at Project Madurai uses the TSCII encoding, but has already started to provide Unicode versions.

History

The need for a common encoding for Tamil was felt by members of various mailing list based forums in mid-1990s, as there were multiple custom coded fonts were prevalent in those forums. While some of the commercial encodings were popular than the others, they were not accepted by wider community due to conflicting commercial interests. While Unicode was accepted by most as the future standard, most of the desktop systems at that time were still not capable of handling Unicode for Tamil language, and an interim 8-bit encoding was required.

A separate mailing list for discussion of such encodings (webmasters@tamil.net) was created in 1997 to initiate this discussion, starting with an email written by Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram to the popular Tamil author Sujatha who headed the committee for standardization of Tamil keyboard. [2] This forum quickly attracted enthusiastic participants from across the globe, including several prominent Tamil scholars.[ neutrality is disputed ] Archives of these discussion are maintained by INFITT. [3]

Subsequent to publishing TSCII, most of the members of webmasters@tamil.net mailing list became part of INFITT, which is a wider initiative to bring in standardization and continued development in various areas of Tamil computing.

Codepage layout

TSCII
0123456789ABCDEF
8x [lower-alpha 1] ஸ்ரீக்ஷஜ்ஷ்ஸ்ஹ்க்ஷ்
9x ஙுஞுஙூஞூ
Ax NBSP ி ©
Bx
Cxடிடீகுசுடுணு
Dxதுநுபுமுயுருலுவுழுளுறுனுகூசூடூணூ
Exதூநூபூமூயூரூலூவூழூளூறூனூக்ங்ச்ஞ்
Fxட்ண்த்ந்ப்ம்ய்ர்ல்வ்ழ்ள்ற்ன்
  1. U+0BE6 TAMIL DIGIT ZERO, which was added with Unicode version 4.1 in March, 2005

Conversion Tools

Text encoded in UTF-8 can be converted to TSCII using the GNU iconv tools as follows,

$iconv-futf-8-ttsciihello.utf8>hello.tscii 

Whereas conversion from TSCII to UTF-8 is done by interchanging -f and -t flags.

Visual Application

An open source project is available at AnyTaFont2UTF8 is maintained by Isaiyini Tamil Community

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Character encoding</span> Using numbers to represent text characters

Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as "code points" and collectively comprise a "code space", a "code page", or a "character map".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ISO/IEC 8859-1</span> Character encoding

ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, Information technology—8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. ISO/IEC 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 1", consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script. This character-encoding scheme is used throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is the basis for some popular 8-bit character sets and the first two blocks of characters in Unicode.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plain text</span> Term for computer data consisting only of unformatted characters of readable material

In computing, plain text is a loose term for data that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects. It may also include a limited number of "whitespace" characters that affect simple arrangement of text, such as spaces, line breaks, or tabulation characters. Plain text is different from formatted text, where style information is included; from structured text, where structural parts of the document such as paragraphs, sections, and the like are identified; and from binary files in which some portions must be interpreted as binary objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unicode</span> Character encoding standard

Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard, is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 15.1 of the standard defines 149813 characters and 161 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts.

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UTF-16</span> Variable-width encoding of Unicode, using one or two 16-bit code units

UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as code points are encoded with one or two 16-bit code units. UTF-16 arose from an earlier obsolete fixed-width 16-bit encoding now known as "UCS-2" (for 2-byte Universal Character Set), once it became clear that more than 216 (65,536) code points were needed, including most emoji and important CJK characters such as for personal and place names.

The byte-order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character code, U+FEFFZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE, whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text:

UTF-32 (32-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a fixed-length encoding used to encode Unicode code points that uses exactly 32 bits (four bytes) per code point (but a number of leading bits must be zero as there are far fewer than 232 Unicode code points, needing actually only 21 bits). UTF-32 is a fixed-length encoding, in contrast to all other Unicode transformation formats, which are variable-length encodings. Each 32-bit value in UTF-32 represents one Unicode code point and is exactly equal to that code point's numerical value.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mojibake</span> Garbled text as a result of incorrect character encodings

Mojibake is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.

UTF-7 is an obsolete variable-length character encoding for representing Unicode text using a stream of ASCII characters. It was originally intended to provide a means of encoding Unicode text for use in Internet E-mail messages that was more efficient than the combination of UTF-8 with quoted-printable.

In computing, JIS encoding refers to several Japanese Industrial Standards for encoding the Japanese language. Strictly speaking, the term means either:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GB 18030</span> Official Chinese character encoding

GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as Information Technology — Chinese coded character set and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. As a Unicode Transformation Format, GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. It is also compatible with legacy encodings including GB/T 2312, CP936, and GBK 1.0.

VISCII is an unofficially-defined modified ASCII character encoding for using the Vietnamese language with computers. It should not be confused with the similarly-named officially registered VSCII encoding. VISCII keeps the 95 printable characters of ASCII unmodified, but it replaces 6 of the 33 control characters with printable characters. It adds 128 precomposed characters. Unicode and the Windows-1258 code page are now used for virtually all Vietnamese computer data, but legacy VSCII and VISCII files may need conversion.

Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is a coding scheme for representing various writing systems of India. It encodes the main Indic scripts and a Roman transliteration. The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. ISCII does not encode the writing systems of India that are based on Persian, but its writing system switching codes nonetheless provide for Kashmiri, Sindhi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic. The Persian-based writing systems were subsequently encoded in the PASCII encoding.

GB/T 2312-1980 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. GB refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准), whereas the T suffix denotes a non-mandatory standard.

In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, iconv is a command-line program and a standardized application programming interface (API) used to convert between different character encodings. "It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode conversion."

Several 8-bit character sets (encodings) were designed for binary representation of common Western European languages, which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols. These character sets also happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.

The Universal Coded Character Set is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS), which is the basis of many character encodings, improving as characters from previously unrepresented typing systems are added.

luit

luit is a utility program used to translate the character set of a computer program so that its output can be displayed correctly on a terminal emulator that uses a different character set. Whereas iconv converts the character set of strings or text files at rest, luit converts the input and output of programs running interactively.

Tamil All Character Encoding (TACE16) is a scheme for encoding the Tamil script in the Private Use Area of Unicode, implementing a syllabary-based character model differing from the modified-ISCII model used by Unicode's existing Tamil implementation.

References

  1. https://www.iana.org/assignments/charset-reg/TSCII [ bare URL plain text file ]
  2. "A proposal for font encoding scheme for tamil".
  3. "Tamil Discussion at webmasters@tamil.net".