Indic standards

Below I will give attention to:

ISCII 91 (IS 13194:91)


In 1983 in India there emerged a standard for coding, called ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange). I have no more information about that version, what I show above is the modified stanadard that emerged in 1991. This standard does not only apply to the Devanagari script given above, but also to the Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil script; all of them being used. Because the structure of these scripts is so similar a single coding can be applied to all of them, immediately providing transliteration between the scripts (see however below). Contrary to most codes given here, the Indian codes do not map directly to displayed glyphs, but rather give a structural coding. For instance, the vowel marks (given in the chart together with the position were the consonants to which they are applied go) in the code always follow the consonant code; in display this is not always true. In the chart above we see one vowel mark that will precede the consonant in display. In other scripts there are even vowel marks that both precede and follow the consonant. Moreover, when the "absence of vowel" mark (the consonants normally carry an implicit vowel "a") is applied to a consonant it will in many cases be contracted with a following consonant, just like the ligatures in the Latin script. The difference is that in the Latin script the constituents are mostly easily found, this is far from true in the Indian scripts. The blocks marked with a red border are symbols that do not really occur in Devanagari, they are invented for the standard to display the structure, in other scripts they are present, but others may be unavailable. The upper half of the full chart is the standard ASCII chart. The "INV" code is to allow vowels to be displayed in full by coding them as the "INV" code followed by the vowel mark (although all vowels also have a separate code for the full display). The "ALT" code applies to following code and changes meaning, as does the "EXT" code. The latter is specially used for extensions, while the former is used to change display script and attributes like that. The digits in the lowest rows are the native digits, they are not used very much, mostly the western digits are used, however they are available (though not in every script). Through the use of "ALT" you can always change the display of digits (whether they are coded as western digits or as native digits). The full standard can be found in pdf on the CDAC site. Note: the table in appendix A contains some errors.

PC_ISCII


In addition there is a code called PC-ISCII. This code is similar to the code before, but the positions are completely different. The middle rows in the chart are freed to allow for the box drawing graphics from the standard PC. The order of the symbols is exactly the same (except for "ALT" and "EXT", but those do not carry sorting information). But the native digits are not present, you can always get at them through "ALT" codes.

Script dependent ISCII

The specific versions of ISCII for the different scripts are shown below:

Devanagari ISCII


This chart shows the codes actually used in the Devanagari script (which is used for the Hindi language and many other languages).

Gurmukhi ISCII


Here we see the Gurmukhi script, used for (amongst others) Punjabi.

Gujarati ISCII


Next comes the Gujarati script for the same language.

Oriya ISCII


This is the script for the Oriya language.

Bengali ISCII


The Bengali script is shown here.

Assamese ISCII


Assamese is written with a script very similar to the Bengali script. One glyph is different and there is one additional glyph. In Unicode the two scripts are merged into a single code page, and the Assamese glyphs got their own (distinctive) code points.

Telugu ISCII


This script is used for Telugu. I have not yet been able to find script specific digits.

Kannada ISCII


This is the Kannada script.

Malayalam ISCII


Here I show the Malayalam version of ISCII, again without script specific digits.

Tamil ISCII


And this is the Tamil version, also without digits.