Indian Script Code for Information Interchange: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:25, 2 February 2012

Revision as of 09:14, 6 August 2012

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One motivation for the use of a single encoding is the idea that it will allow easy [[transliteration]] from one writing system to another. However, there are enough incompatibilities that this is not really a practical idea. See [http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/multi_sys/exist_codes.php#Interchange About ISCII].

ISCII is a statefulan 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain [[American Standard Code for Information Interchange|ASCII]], the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific. In addition to the codepoints representing characters, ISCII makes use of a codepoint with mnemonic ATR 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.

ISCII has not been widely used outside of certain government institutions and 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.