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Subject: TSCII v 1.7 Release Announcement
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 09:37:37 -0800
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From: "Mani M. Manivannan"
Reply-To: "Mani M. Manivannan"
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PRESS RELEASE MONDAY 14 JANUARY 2002
Release of revised form of TSCII Tamil Font Encoding Scheme (v 1.7)
Dear Friends:
Since its release in 1998 as version 1.6, Tamil Font Encoding Scheme
"TSCII" (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange) is being used
widely by the Tamil Diaspora community across the globe for handling
Tamil Text on computers for personal needs and for information interchange
through Internet.
TSCII has been shown to work flawlessly on all three commonly used
computer platforms (Windows, Mac and Unix). Several basic tools
(font faces, text editors and text convertors,..) have been made
available free on the Net to facilitate its usage widely. Several
key Tamil portal sites and majority of Tamil mailing lists are
based on the TSCII scheme.
Unfortunately, for more than a year, there has been some display/
rendering problems for a single Tamil character, third uyir letter
"i" in Microsoft application softwares running on Windows platform.
(in TSCII, "i" is at soft-hyphen slot #173 and this soft-hyphen
is now used alternately in recent MS applications).
In view of the large number of users of Microsoft products worldwide,
recently it was decided to revise TSCII scheme slightly to take care
of this "i" problem. After some discussions through Yahoo-supported
mailing list
version 1.7 with following key features:
i) by adding the glyph "i" at vacant slot 254, assignment of slot
for "i" has been shifted from slot 173 of version 1.6 to 254 in 1.7.
ii) to provide 'backward compatibility' to vast digital Tamil
mateials generated till date using TSCII scheme 1.6, glyph "i" is
also retained at the current slot in scheme 1.7 but its usage in
1.7-based softwares is deprecated (forbidden).
iii) font-faces based on TSCII scheme 1.7 will carry a prefix TSC
and will be labelled uniformly as "TSCxxxx" where xxxx stands for
the name of the font face.
An image file showing the code chart of the revised TSCII 1.7 scheme
is available at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tscii/files/charset17_a.gif
In view of positive results obtained in test runs using model
fontfaces based on TSCII 1.7, promotors of TSCII scheme have decided
to RECOMMEND USAGE OF TSCII 1.7 SCHEME WITH EFFECT FROM THIS
PONGAL DAY OF YEAR 2002. Free Font-faces and Text Editors based
on the revised TSCII 1.7 scheme are being made available through
the TSCII website
http://www.tamil.net/tscii/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tscii/files/
To facilitate the migration process, for an initial period of six
months, users are requested to mark clearly new Tamil text materials
being exchanged through Internet to correspond to version 1.7.
Please take note that, with this changeover to scheme 1.7,
with TSCxxx fonts, you can view Tamil texts based on both TSCII
versions 1.6 and 1.7. With font-faces corresponding to existing scheme
1.6 (xxxxTSC), you CANNOT view 1.7-based texts correctly
even on platforms/softwares where scheme 1.6 has been working
satisfactorily. All users must shift to 1.7-based materials as
soon as possible.
We take this opportunity to thank the global Tamil Diaspora
for their enthusiastic support to TSCII encoding scheme and look
forward to its continued support.
We wish you all a very happy Pongal.
Mani M. Manivannan
Spokesperson for TSCII development Team
http://www.tamil.net/tscii/
http://www.tscii.org
