Indian Script Code for Information Interchange: Difference between revisions

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{{Contains special characters|Indic}}

{{More citations needed|date=February 2022}}

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

ISCII has not been widely used outside certain government institutions, although a variant without the {{ctrl|ATR|internal=yes}} mechanism was used on [[classic Mac OS]], [[Mac OS Devanagari encoding|Mac OS Devanagari]],<ref name="appledevanagari"/> and it has now been rendered largely obsolete by [[Unicode]]. Unicode uses a separate block for each Indic writing system, and largely preserves the ISCII layout within each block.<ref name="unicode">{{cite book |title=The Unicode Standard v15.0 Chapter 12 |publisher=The Unicode Consortium |url=https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch12.pdf |access-date=13 August 2024}}</ref>{{rp|p=462}}.

==Background==

The Brahmi-derived writing systems have similar structure.<ref name="unicode"/>{{rp|p=462}}. So ISCII encodes letters with the same phonetic value at the same code point, overlaying the various scripts. For example, the ISCII codes 0xB3 0xDB represent [ki]. This will be rendered as കി in [[Malayalam]], कि in Devanagari, as ਕਿ in Gurmukhi, and as கி in Tamil. The writing system can be selected in rich text by markup or in plain text by means of the {{ctrl|ATR|internal=yes}} code described below.

One motivation for the use of a single encoding is the idea that it will allow easy [[transliteration]] from one writing system to another.<ref name="unicode"/>{{rp|p=462}}. However, there are enough incompatibilities that this is not really a practical idea.

ISCII is an 8-bit encoding.<ref name="std"/>{{rp|p=4}}. The lower 128 code points are plain [[American Standard Code for Information Interchange|ASCII]], the upper 128 code points are ISCII-specific. In addition to the code points representing characters, ISCII makes use of a code point with mnemonic {{ctrl|ATR|internal=yes}} that indicates that the following byte contains one of two kinds of information. One set of values changes the writing system until the next writing system indicator or end-of-line. Another set of values select display modes such as bold and italic. ISCII does not provide a means of indicating the default writing system.

== Codepage layout ==

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The following table shows the character set for [[Devanagari]]. The code sets for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu are similar, with each Devanagari form replaced by the [[Brahmic family of scripts|equivalent form in each writing system]]{{r|name=unicode|p=462}}. Each character is shown with its decimal code and its [[Unicode]] equivalent.

{|{{chset-table-header1|ISCII Devanagari<ref name="std">{{Cite book|url=httphttps://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/iscii91.pdf|publisher=Beureau of Indian Standards|title=IS13194:1991 (Soft copy)|year=1999}}</ref>{{rp|p=14}}}}

|-

| {{chset-left1|0x}}

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* 57010: Gujarati

* 57011: Punjabi (Gurmukhi)

* 54654: gg

==Code points for all languages==