Representation of Indian Languages in Unicode Standards
Om Vikas &
Manoj Jain - Ministry of Communications & Information
Technology New Delhi
| Intended Audience: |
Software Engineers, Font Designers, Graphic Designers,
Technical Writers, Web Administrators, Designers |
| Session Level: |
Intermediate, Advanced |
Need for non-English languages gave rise to ASCII equivalent
local encoding standards - 7 Bit code, 8 Bit code, monolingual or
bilingual. ISO multi-octet code was conceived for multilingual
environment. Major IT industries formed Unicode consortium to
expedite finalisation of 2- byte multiscript codes and recommend to
the ISO for ratification. Unicode is the new foundation for the
process of internationalization. Older code pages were difficult to
use, and have inconsistent definitions for characters.
Internationalizing code while using the same code base is complex,
since it has to support different character sets--with different
architectures--for different markets. Mixing older character sets
together is a nightmare, since all data has to be tagged, and
mixing data from different sources is nearly impossible to do
reliably.
Keywords:
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