This tutorial will use examples to provide you with an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of Indic scripts. It will also briefly describe some of the practical issues that should be borne in mind for Unicode-based implementation of these scripts. Scripts covered include Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Outline:

• Introduction
• Historical background
• Sounds of indic scripts

Characteristic script features:

• Direction & positioning
• Consonants & inherent vowels
• Vowel signs
• Independent vowels
• Consonant clusters
• Nasalisation
• The visarga
• Numbers

Implementation notes:

• Character sets
• Combining characters
• Variant glyph forms

While the tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it has also attracted very good reviews from people at an intermediate and advanced level, due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is needed.