1. UNICODE & Indic Scripts
Dr. Mukul K Sinha
Expert Software Consultants Ltd., New Delhi

2. Indian Languages & Scripts
Indian Languages – 22 Constitutionally Recog.
Scripts – 11 (+3 Mithilakshar / Olchiki / Maitie Mayank)
Devnagari – 8, Bangala -3, Gurumukhi, Gujarati, Oriya,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam/ Roman/ Perso-Arabian – 3
(Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili, Santhali, Bodo, Dogri)
(Bangala, Assameses, Manipuri), (Urdu, Kashmiri,Sindhi)
Literate Population 65%, English 5%, Multi-lingual mostly
Digital Divide = Language Divide ?!
Need of Indic Language Computing Environment!

3. Scripts: % of Population
Devnagari
Bangala
Telugu
Tamil
Arabic/Pers
Gujarati
Kannada –
Malayalam – 3.7
Oriya
Gurumukhi – 2.9
…..
Govt. of India –
1997 Survey

4. Scripts : Print & Internet
% Population % Print % Web
Latin
CJK
Indic
Year 2000
Language & Script
Europe (11)
Indic (18+4)

5. Indic Scripts & ISCII
Dept. of Electronics – Indian Script Standard Committee 1986 – 88
– ISCII –1998.
ISCII – – 8 bit character Code (Lower Set ASCII )
– Escape sequence for Script identity.
– Brahmi-based-covering 9 Indic scripts
(Transliteration – automatic)

6. Unicode Consortium - History
Consortium / Non-profit / Regd USA.
Open Standard / ISO & W3C
Members – Corporate / Institutional - Voting
Assoc. / Individual - Non-voting
To meet ‘implementation needs’
that will not be invalidated any time in future

7. Unicode For Characters (Scripts / Ideographs / Symbols/…) NOT Glyphs.
Platform independent.
Content Inter-operable / Inter-change.
Availability of tools for text processing.
Global Presence.

8. Unicode Version Unicode Version 1/1.1/1.2 – 1991 / 92 / 93 –
Version 2.0 /2.1 – 1996 /97 – Internet Web
Version 3.0/3.1/3.2 – 2000 /1 /2 – India Govt.
Version 4.0/4.1 – 2003/2004 – 96,382 (70,207)
Version

9. Unicode : Technical Specification
Code Area – 10FFFF (Hexadecimal)
Basic Multilingual Plane
0- FFFF bit Code (2bytes) – Plane 0
E000 – F000 (Private Use Area)
Plane 1 .. Plane … Plane 15 (PUA- A) + PUA-B
PUA (National standard + Vendor Specific Codes) (Japanese – NEC – Fujitsu)
Indic Script – One code page for each language
For Information Exchange – UTF – 8 (8 bit byte string)
can be 1 to 4 (UTF-8) bytes

10. Unicode & Indic Scripts
Conjuncts – Glyphs for rendering (not for Unicode)
- Multiple ways to express -
ZWNJ (U+200C) / ZWJ (U+200D)
Collation Unicode & Language Order different
- Devnagari – Hindi /Marathi
- Latin – (Danish / Norwegion – Ä / Ö)
(Hungarian / German)

11. Unicode Stability Policy
Encoding Stability
- Code NOT to be moved /removed
- Later version – Superset of Earlier Version
Name Stability
- Character Name NOT to be changed
Identity Stability
- Identifying characteristic – unchanged
- Glyph / Case Mapping / ….
……….

12. Unicode : Stages for Acceptance
Initial & Explore Stage
Chakma / Newari (BMP), Kaithi /Ahom/ Indus Valley (P1)
Proposal in early Committee Recommendation
Manipuri (BMP), Brahmi (Plane 1)
Approved Proposal with ISO
Lepcha /Ol-chiki /Saurashtra (BMP)
Finalized Encoding Script in Pre Publication
Code Pages for Limbu / kharosti / Sylot Nagari

13. Tasks Convergence – State Govts. / Language Commun.
Active Participation in UNICODE
Recognized Languages
Additional Initiatives for
Other Indic Region Scripts
E-Governance Applications Unicode complaint Indic Scripts