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 language, Tamil speakers in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere to write the Tamil language. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. ...

. The lower 128 codepoints are plain

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

, 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 Internet P ...

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

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character 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 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, instead, uses the logical order encoding strategy for Tamil, following

ISCII 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: Eastern Nagari, Bengali–Ass ...

, in contrast to the case of Thai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered by

TIS-620 Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533, commonly referred to as TIS-620, is the most common single-byte character encoding for the Thai language. The standard is published by the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), an organ of the Ministry ...

was adopted. The government of

Tamil Nadu Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is the southernmost States and union territories of India, state of India. The List of states and union territories of India by area, tenth largest Indian state by area and the List of states and union territories of Indi ...

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 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

Text encoded in UTF-8 can be converted 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

TSCII Start Page

Unicode Technical Note #15 Text conversion From TSCII 1.7 to Unicode

INFITT (International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil)

TSCII to Unicode Online & Webpage Conversion

Padma – Mozilla extension for transforming TSCII to Unicode
{{character encoding Tamil character-encoding standards Character sets