RE: discontent about Indic scripts and Unicode

From: Carl W. Brown (cbrown@xnetinc.com)
Date: Wed Sep 19 2001 - 20:49:39 EDT


Ram,

> ISCII has escape sequences which announce the start of a new Indic script.
> An ATR char followed by special codepoint forms the escape sequence.
> It is possible to support a page that contains different Indic
> scripts.There are
>
> problems with the standard like, it assumes a default starting language,
> which makes sense if the input is from keyboard and language is obtained
> from the environment, but notl if data is exchanged between computers.

It looks like ISCII and Unicode are addressing two different multi-lingual
issues. Unicode deals with problems like Chinese where you have the same
writing for different spoken languages. When it come to using the same
language or similar language that use different scripts that answer is
transliteration which is an implementation process that is independent of
the Unicode encoding.

The ISCII is an attempt to provide cheap transliteration by using the same
encoding and just changing the font. You can not do that with Unicode.
However, I suspect that the transliteration approach will produce better
results if properly implemented.

However, I do not understand the TSCII for Tamil. Unicode provides the
script separation that they want.

Carl



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