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		 ௦[lower-alpha 1]
0BE6		 ௧
0BE7		 ஸ்ரீ
0BB8 0BCD 0BB0 0BC0		 ஜ
0B9C		 ஷ
0BB7		 ஸ
0BB8		 ஹ
0BB9		 க்ஷ
0B95 0BCD 0BB7		 ஜ்
0B9C 0BCD		 ஷ்
0BB7 0BCD		 ஸ்
0BB8 0BCD		 ஹ்
0BB9 0BCD		 க்ஷ்
0B95 0BCD 0BB7 0BCD		 ௨
0BE8		 ௩
0BE9		 ௪
0BEA
9_
144		 ௫
0BEB		 ‘
2018		 ’
2019		 “
201C		 ”
201D		 ௬
0BEC		 ௭
0BED		 ௮
0BEE		 ௯
0BEF		 ஙு
0B99 0BC1		 ஞு
0B9E 0BC1		 ஙூ
0B99 0BC2		 ஞூ
0B9E 0BC2		 ௰
0BF0		 ௱
0BF1		 ௲
0BF2
A_
160		 NBSP
00A0		 ா
0BBE		 ி
0BBF		 ீ
0BC0		 ு
0BC1		 ூ
0BC2		 ெ
0BC6		 ே
0BC7		 ை
0BC8		 ©
00A9		 ௗ
0BD7		 அ
0B85		 ஆ
0B86		 ஈ
0B88		 உ
0B89
B_
176		 ஊ
0B8A		 எ
0B8E		 ஏ
0B8F		 ஐ
0B90		 ஒ
0B92		 ஓ
0B93		 ஔ
0B94		 ஃ
0B83		 க
0B95		 ங
0B99		 ச
0B9A		 ஞ
0B9E		 ட
0B9F		 ண
0BA3		 த
0BA4		 ந
0BA8
C_
192		 ப
0BAA		 ம
0BAE		 ய
0BAF		 ர
0BB0		 ல
0BB2		 வ
0BB5		 ழ
0BB4		 ள
0BB3		 ற
0BB1		 ன
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		 இ
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
  1. http://www.iana.org/assignments/charset-reg/TSCII
  2. http://www.infitt.org/tscii/archives/msg00001.html
  3. http://www.infitt.org/tscii/archives/maillist.html
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