Standardization in Indian Language Computing - An Overview
Need for standards - Basic Hardware systems and / or Software applications are designed and developed even today with only English in mind. To proliferate the acceptance and usage of Indian languages, the Indian language implementation / flavour needs to sit on top of existing applications and hardware frameworks. GIST has a focus on all 22 official Indian languages. Of these - Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Malayalam, Maithili, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Santhali, Tamil, Telugu use a left to right writing style while Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri are mostly used in right to left mode. There are several overlaps wherein one language may use multiple scripts (eg: Konkani may be written in Devanagari, Kannada or Roman) as well as having one script like Devanagari cater to multiple languages. In order for any application to reach the masses of India it is important to support Information Technology in various languages of India.
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ISCII
( Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange)
Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)
is the character code for Indian languages which suggests
the encoding for all Indian languages that originate from
Brahmi script. In 1991, The Bureau of Indian Standards
adopted the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange.
ISCII was evolved by a standardization committee under
the Department of Electronics during 1986-88. C-DAC was
an active member of the committee. The ISCII document
is available as IS13194:1991 from the BIS offices.
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Unicode
Standard
The Unicode Consortium is responsible for defining the
behavior and relationships between characters. Unicode
has incorporated a number of scripts prevalent in the
world. Indian scripts also form a part of Unicode standard
now. The Unicode standard encodes Indian language characters
in the same relative positions A0-F4 in ISCII-88 standard.
This parallel code layout emphasizes the structural similarities
of the Brahmi scripts and follows the intention of the
standard to enable one to one mappings between analogous
coding positions in different scripts in the family.
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ISFOC
Standard for Fonts
Indian Standard FOnt Code (ISFOC) is the coding standard
for representation of Indian scripts in the graphical
media. C-DAC took the lead and evolved the character-slice(glyph)
coding standards. Unlike ISCII, these code charts are
different for each script and are represented in 8-bits
only. They are suitable for all GUI environments requiring
bit-map fonts, Type-1 fonts or True Type fonts.
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ISCLAP Standard for
Pager communication
In 1997, Pager Technology was considered mature for adopting
Indian Languages. Motorola took the lead and requested
standardization of a coding scheme for Devnagari and
Gujarati. The Telecom Engineering Center (TEC), C-DAC,
DoE, and the Pager manufacturers agreed to the formulation
of "Indian Standard Code for Language Paging". This was
done, keeping the compatibility to ISCII in mind such
that data inter conversion at sending end from Terminals
and at receiving end would be based on simple formulae.
Inscript
Keyboard Layout:
The Ideal Solution to Indian Language Keyboards
The INSCRIPT keyboard layout is the standard layout, for
data entry in Indian languages. This layout remains common
for all Indian languages and is considered the most scientifically
designed keyboard layout. It takes into consideration
the standard alphabet structure followed by Indian scripts
and The sequence of keystrokes is the same as that of
pronunciation of the words.
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