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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: How to test desktop.mo file?
From:       Thuraiappah Vaseeharan <vasee () ee ! umanitoba ! ca>
Date:       2000-03-22 20:09:38
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> Okay.. I will write a codec this weekend, okay? ;-)

Thanks. 

But ...

I am just thinking aloud here. Correct me if I am wrong. TSCII
just uses the upper ASCII characters for representing Tamil glyphs. (It is
not a multi-byte encoding or anything). As the .po files need to be in
UTF-8 format in future, we can convert them using

recode ISO-8859-1..UTF-8 file.po

Then why do we need to write a separate codec for TSCII? Isn't it the same
as using the iso-8859-1 codec?

> > Another reason for my procrastination is that the Unicode standard for
> > Tamil will change sometime in the future to bring it in line with the
> > Tamil Nadu govt.'s own standard, which is almost identical with TSCII. So
> > we may have to do it all over again.
> 
> Do you have some links? What type of changes are you talking about?

Tamil Nadu govt recently became a member of the unicode consortium. 
(see http://www.unicode.org  ...  members)
They announced a standard charset for tamil called TAB (very similar to
TSCII) in 1999 . Details are in http://www.tamilnet99.org. 

But it is not as widely used as TSCII.

I beleive that they (TN govt.) wants the Unicode consortium to:

either 
change the Tamil charset to match the TAB encoding 
or 
ask unicode to allocate more space to Tamil (now 128 spaces)
so that each tamil character can be represented by a unique code point. 

I am not very clear about what they intend to do. (I could find
nothing on the websites)

Vasee

ps: Tamil Unicode, TAB and TSCII are glyph encodings. Tamil has 247 unique
characters. but as some of the characters are composites (made up of a
group of glyphs) only around 56 different glyphs are required to *display*
the entire tamil alphabet. This is what TSCII/TAB and Unicode has done.

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