Indian Script Code for Information Interchange: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:22, 23 September 2020

Revision as of 15:24, 26 October 2020

Line 9:

The Brahmi-derived writing systems have similar structure. 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 ATR 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. However, there are enough incompatibilities that this is not really a practical idea. See [http://www.acharya.gen.in:8080/multi_sys/exist_codes.php#Interchange About ISCII].

ISCII is an 8-bit encoding. 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 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.