Indian Script Code for Information Interchange: Difference between revisions

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'''ISCII''' ('''I'''ndian '''S'''cript '''C'''ode for '''I'''nformation '''I'''nterchange) is a coding scheme for representing various [[Indic script]]s as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used to depict [[Romanisation|Romanised]] Indic languages. Most of those scripts are rather similar in structure, but have different letter shapes. So ISCII tries to encode the logical structure of the [[Indic script]]s, while script-specific letter shape are expected to be selected by markup or font specification in rich text. For plain text documents the non-printing ATR character can be used to select script-specific letter shape (this mechanism is similar to the use of [[escape sequence]]s). The supported scripts are: [[Assamese script|Assamese]], [[Bengali script|Bengali]], [[Devanagari]], [[Gujarati script|Gujarati]], [[Gurumukhi]], [[Kannada script|Kannada]], [[Malayalam script|Malayalam]], [[Oriya script|Oriya]], [[Tamil script|Tamil]], and [[Telugu script|Telugu]].

It is claimed that manually switching between scripts will easily achieve automatic [[transliteration]], though this is not always straightforward as the casevarious whenIndic transliteratingscripts betweenhave mostincompatibilities supportedamong scriptsthemselves tothat [[Tamilprevent script|Tamil]]round-tripping. See [http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/multi_sys/exist_codes.html#Indian%20Script%20Code%20for%20Information%20Interchange About ISCII].

ISCII is a fixed-length 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain [[ASCII]], the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific.

ISCII has largely been obsoleted by [[Unicode]], which has however attempetd to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks. (Unicode has a separate code-point range for each language.)

[[Unicode]] has largely preserved the ISCII encoding strategy, but has assigned each language a separate codepoint range. So now there is a series of 128-codepoints-long blocks for [[Indic script]]s.

== External links ==