Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing the

Tamil script The Tamil script ( , ) is an abugida script that is used by Tamils and Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. Certain minority languages such as Saurashtra, Bada ...

. The lower 128 codepoints are plain

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

, 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 The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...

in 2007. TSCII encodes the characters in visual (written) order, paralleling the use of the Tamil Typewriter.

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

has used the logical order encoding strategy for Tamil, following

ISCII Indian Script 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 ...

, in contrast to the case of Thai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered by TIS-620 was adopted. The government of

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a state in southern India. It is the tenth largest Indian state by area and the sixth largest by population. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu is the home of the Tamil people, whose Tamil languag ...

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 a
Project Madurai
uses the TSCII encoding, but has already started to provide

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

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 a
AnyTaFont2UTF8
is maintained by Isaiyini Tamil Community

References

External links