Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange

In this article we are going to address the topic of Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange, a topic that has been the subject of great interest and debate in recent years. Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange has raised mixed opinions and has been the subject of study by numerous experts in the field. Throughout this article we are going to analyze in depth the different aspects related to Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange, from its origin and evolution to its impact on current society. In addition, we will examine the different perspectives and approaches that exist around Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange, with the aim of providing a comprehensive and enriching vision on this topic. Without a doubt, Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange is a topical topic that deserves to be explored in detail, and we are sure that this article will provide a fresh and insightful perspective on the same.

This article contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

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.

TSCII encodes the characters in visual (written) order, paralleling the use of the Tamil Typewriter.

Unicode has used 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 WWW.

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 ([email protected]) 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. This forum quickly attracted enthusiastic participants from across the globe, including several prominent Tamil scholars. Archives of these discussion are maintained by INFITT.

Subsequent to publishing TSCII, most of the members of [email protected] 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
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
8x ௦ ௧ ஸ்ரீ ஜ ஷ ஸ ஹ க்ஷ ஜ் ஷ் ஸ் ஹ் க்ஷ் ௨ ௩ ௪
9x ௫ ‘ ’ “ ” ௬ ௭ ௮ ௯ ஙு ஞு ஙூ ஞூ ௰ ௱ ௲
Ax NBSP ா ி ீ ு ூ ெ ே ை © ௗ அ ஆ ஈ உ
Bx ஊ எ ஏ ஐ ஒ ஓ ஔ ஃ க ங ச ஞ ட ண த ந
Cx ப ம ய ர ல வ ழ ள ற ன டி டீ கு சு டு ணு
Dx து நு பு மு யு ரு லு வு ழு ளு று னு கூ சூ டூ ணூ
Ex தூ நூ பூ மூ யூ ரூ லூ வூ ழூ ளூ றூ னூ க் ங் ச் ஞ்
Fx ட் ண் த் ந் ப் ம் ய் ர் ல் வ் ழ் ள் ற் ன் இ
  1. ^ U+0BE6 TAMIL DIGIT ZERO, which was added with Unicode version 4.1 in March, 2005

Conversion Tools

You can convert UTF-8 encoded documents to TSCII using the GNU iconv tools as follows, 

$ iconv -f utf-8 -t tscii hello.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

  • TACE16 (Tamil All Character Encoding)

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 [email protected]".

External links

Wikious
Boobota
Sagapedia