Building a page with Indic scripts using Unicode- I
The best way to display multilingual Indic scripts right now is the use of Unicode. Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Unicode is designed to be a multilingual encoding that requires no escape sequences or switching between scripts. For any given Indic script, the consonant and vowel letter codes of Unicode are based on ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange).
There are lots of ways to encode you webpage to display Indic scripts, but the best way which is available right now is the use Unicode. Before Unicode was made a standard norm to display the Indian languages, people were using all sorts of peculiar ways to display the text. It varied from embedding dynamic fonts in the webpage that downloads the required font into the system, or just providing a link to the required font, that the reader needed to install it to read the page. Most of these solutions worked for IE or Netscape for Windows. The most in genuine idea to display the text is to just make an image with text in it, and embed the image in place of the text. Iam not kidding, there are few websites around that still use this solution, you can just imagine the time it takes to load the whole page. Unicode offers far simpler solution than that.
So the goal of this article is to help a developer to make webpages using Indic scripts, this include a description about the different input methods involved, and putting them in the webpage. This article concentrates on the best encoding method that’s available now, using Unicode, for encoding Indic scripts.
Viewing the Unicode text
The end user to see the Indic script encoded using Unicode, need either the Unicode font installed in his computer or have their computer enabled complex text support. The older versions of the operating systems seems to have problems displaying the Unicode text, the modern operating systems have a full support for Unicode. Taking simple measure can enable a viewer to see the text in older versions, they range from downloading the Unicode font and making changes in their control panel.
Wikipedia has a detailed article as to how to enable your computer to view Unicode text.
How to input Unicode text
The text input in Unicode is pretty easy as compared to other forms of encoding.Keyboard
The ideal situation for inputting Indic script is if you have a standard Inscript (Indian Script) keyboard. A Inscript keyboard is one which have your native language printed on the keys. This type of keyboard is very useful for users who are pretty good in typing in their native languages. This type of keyboards allows the users to type directly in their native languages.
The other kinds of keyboards are that are normally available for us, with English letters on them, they can be called as phonetic keyboards. They are called so because, to enter a language other than English, you need to type the words in that language in English, using phonetics. The saving grace is that, most of the Indian languages are phonetic based, so there’s not much problem using this keyboard. In this case you need to have a special kind of software that takes the input in phonetic form and transfers into your native language. Some software’s like RTS (rice translation scheme) and VOLT come into picture in this case.
