Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange

Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing the Tamil script. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are TSCII-specific. After long years of being used on the Internet by private agreement only, it was successfully registered with the IANA in 2007.[1]

TSCII encodes the characters in visual (written) order, paralleling the use of the Tamil Typewriter.

Unicode has used the logical order encoding strategy for Tamil, following ISCII, in contrast to the case of Thai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered by TIS-620 was adopted.

The government of Tamil Nadu endorses its own TAB/TAM standards for 8-bit encoding and other, older encoding schemes can still be found on the WWW.

The free etext collection at Project Madurai uses the TSCII encoding, but has already started to provide Unicode versions.

History

The need for a common encoding for Tamil was felt by members of various mailing list based forums in mid-1990s, as there were multiple custom coded fonts were prevalent in those forums. While some of the commercial encodings were popular than the others, they were not accepted by wider community due to conflicting commercial interests. While Unicode was accepted by most as the future standard, most of the desktop systems at that time were still not capable of handling Unicode for Tamil language, and an interim 8-bit encoding was required.

A separate mailing list for discussion of such encodings (webmasters@tamil.net) was created in 1997 to initiate this discussion, starting with an email written by Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram to the popular Tamil author Sujatha who headed the committee for standardization of Tamil keyboard.[2] This forum quickly attracted enthusiastic participants from across the globe, including several prominent Tamil scholars. Archives of these discussion are maintained by INFITT.[3]

Subsequent to publishing TSCII, most of the members of webmasters@tamil.net mailing list became part of INFITT, which is a wider initiative to bring in standardization and continued development in various areas of Tamil computing.

Codepage layout

TSCII
_0 _1 _2 _3 _4 _5 _6 _7 _8 _9 _A _B _C _D _E _F
8_
128
[lower-alpha 1]
0BE6

0BE7
ஸ்ரீ
0BB8 0BCD 0BB0 0BC0

0B9C

0BB7

0BB8

0BB9
க்ஷ
0B95 0BCD 0BB7
ஜ்
0B9C 0BCD
ஷ்
0BB7 0BCD
ஸ்
0BB8 0BCD
ஹ்
0BB9 0BCD
க்ஷ்
0B95 0BCD 0BB7 0BCD

0BE8

0BE9

0BEA
9_
144

0BEB

2018

2019

201C

201D

0BEC

0BED

0BEE

0BEF
ஙு
0B99 0BC1
ஞு
0B9E 0BC1
ஙூ
0B99 0BC2
ஞூ
0B9E 0BC2

0BF0

0BF1

0BF2
A_
160
NBSP
00A0

0BBE
ி
0BBF

0BC0

0BC1

0BC2

0BC6

0BC7

0BC8
©
00A9

0BD7

0B85

0B86

0B88

0B89
B_
176

0B8A

0B8E

0B8F

0B90

0B92

0B93

0B94

0B83

0B95

0B99

0B9A

0B9E

0B9F

0BA3

0BA4

0BA8
C_
192

0BAA

0BAE

0BAF

0BB0

0BB2

0BB5

0BB4

0BB3

0BB1

0BA9
டி
0B9F 0BBF
டீ
0B9F 0BC0
கு
0B95 0BC1
சு
0B9A 0BC1
டு
0B9F 0BC1
ணு
0BA3 0BC1
D_
208
து
0BA4 0BC1
நு
0BA8 0BC1
பு
0BAA 0BC1
மு
0BAE 0BC1
யு
0BAF 0BC1
ரு
0BB0 0BC1
லு
0BB2 0BC1
வு
0BB5 0BC1
ழு
0BB4 0BC1
ளு
0BB3 0BC1
று
0BB1 0BC1
னு
0BA9 0BC1
கூ
0B95 0BC2
சூ
0B9A 0BC2
டூ
0B9F 0BC2
ணூ
0BA3 0BC2
E_
224
தூ
0BA4 0BC2
நூ
0BA8 0BC2
பூ
0BAA 0BC2
மூ
0BAE 0BC2
யூ
0BAF 0BC2
ரூ
0BB0 0BC2
லூ
0BB2 0BC2
வூ
0BB5 0BC2
ழூ
0BB4 0BC2
ளூ
0BB3 0BC2
றூ
0BB1 0BC2
னூ
0BA9 0BC2
க்
0B95 0BCD
ங்
0B99 0BCD
ச்
0B9A 0BCD
ஞ்
0B9E 0BCD
F_
240
ட்
0B9F 0BCD
ண்
0BA3 0BCD
த்
0BA4 0BCD
ந்
0BA8 0BCD
ப்
0BAA 0BCD
ம்
0BAE 0BCD
ய்
0BAF 0BCD
ர்
0BB0 0BCD
ல்
0BB2 0BCD
வ்
0BB5 0BCD
ழ்
0BB4 0BCD
ள்
0BB3 0BCD
ற்
0BB1 0BCD
ன்
0BA9 0BCD

0B87

  Letter  Number  Punctuation  Symbol  Other  Undefined

  1. U+0BE6 TAMIL DIGIT ZERO, which was added with Unicode version 4.1 in March, 2005

Conversion Tools

You can convert UTF-8 encoded documents to TSCII using the GNU iconv tools as follows,

$ iconv -f utf-8 -t tscii hello.utf8 > hello.tscii

Whereas conversion from TSCII to UTF-8 is done by interchanging -f and -t flags.

Visual Application

An open source project is available at AnyTaFont2UTF8 is maintained by Isaiyini Tamil Community

See also

  • TACE16 (Tamil All Character Encoding)

References

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