TSCII - The Tamil Encoding Standard

Introduction

TSCII stands for Tamil Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is a character encoding standard for Tamil on computers. Read the draft proposal released in December 1997, for a detailed discussion. The current draft is labelled, TSCII 1.7.

Evolution

The following are the different versions of the character sets drafted at various stages of discussion. A discussion on the rationale behind each of these drafts will follow soon.

Version 1.1

First version.

Version 1.2

Second version. Old tamil characters were removed. Tamil numerals added

Version 1.3

Third version. Copyright and registration symbols were added.

Version 1.4

Fourth version. This was later released to the internet public for cemments as TSCII draft.

Version 1.5

Fifth version. Few characters were repositioned to get maximum possible compatibility between different operating systems and softwares.

Version 1.5.2

Some more repositioning in the 128-159 range. The tamil numerals were moved to hot-slots, those which are not accessible by some of the softwares.

Version 1.6

The au-length modifier was added. Registration symbol and bullet character were removed. This version is widely in use for over 3 years

Version 1.7

Current version. To fix ikaram problem in certain browsers, glyph for ikaram is duplicated in a vacant position (slot #254). This version will be mostly backward compatible with version 1.6

Last modified on 24-Dec-2001

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