Draft Proposal for formal registration of TSCII bilingual encoding
with IETF/IANA as per RFC 2978 guidelines

To:
ietf-charsets@iana.org

Subject:
Registration of new charset

Character set name:
TSCII
(TAMIL SCRIPT CODE FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE)

Character set aliases:
None

Suitability for use in MIME text:
YES

Published Specifications:
www.tscii.org/tsciispec.html

ISO 10646 Equivalency Table:
http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn15/

Intended usage:
COMMON

Additional Information:

Tamil is one of the main Indian languages (Dravidian in Origin) currently spoken by over 70 million people worldwide. TSCII (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange) is a bilingual 8-bit glyph-based encoding scheme (Roman and Tamil) to deal with Tamil materials on computers and for Information Interchange across platforms using different protocols and document formats. The TSCII scheme was collectively worked out through Net-based discussions in 1998. TSCII is modelled on the ISO-8859-XX scheme with standard plain ASCII set filling the 7-bit part and a set of Tamil character glyphs filling the 8-bit part.

The TSCII scheme has been widely in use for over 5 years in all three popular computer platforms (Windows, Macintosh and Unix/Linux). In addition to millions of home-users (particularly in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka Western Europe and North America), TSCII encoding is used widely in Net-based mailing lists, newspapers and ezines on-line, digital library etc. Legacy data in TSCII format generated during the last 5 years is quite substantial and is growing constantly.

TSCII as an established language encoding is already recognized by major IT players like the Unicode Consortium, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. With OS-level support for Tamil in Microsoft Windows 2000 and later OS releases and very recently in Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) release, Tamil Diaspora has started to use Unicode already. The Purpose of this formal registration with IETF is to facilitate migration of the vast amounts of legacy data in TSCII and multitude of users.

Person(s) & email address to contact for further information:

TSCII USER GROUP represented by


TAMIL SCRIPT CODE FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE (TSCII)

Glyph/Character Listing and ISO 10646 Mapping Table

Format: Three tab-separated columns

Column #1 is character/glyph graphic representation
Column #2 is the TSCII code position (in hex)
Column #3 is the TSCII character name

ISO 10646 Mapping table can be obtained from
http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn15

This table below is based on Unicode/utf-8 format.
Hence you need to use an Unicode-compliant web-browser and an Unicode font that has the Tamil Unicode block included.

NOTES:

This file was last updated on 13 jan. 2007
v.8.1/MM-KK-MN/012007