Thursday, April 22, 2004
Of ISCII, ISFOC and Unicode
I’ve been doing some work on ISCII [PDF] and Unicode for Mahiti for about two months now. Last month I wrote a Unicode to ISCII converter in Python as a compliment to Meyarivan’s iscii2utf8.py (the code will be released under a BSD-like license after a little cleaning up).
The idea behind this is that there is a large base of systems out there that are not Unicode capable. For the sake of users with such systems, Mahiti wants to offer two versions of every Indian language page: one in Unicode and one in ISCII—which is an 8-bit standard—using font encoding. CDAC has released several high quality non-Unicode fonts that we are hoping to use.
Now we’ve found another problem: these fonts aren’t ISCII encoded either. They use another encoding called ISFOC, which varies by script—meaning a separate converter for each script. While CDAC publishes a table of characters, their converters are proprietary.
I was almost resigned to making comparison charts and writing converters myself, but Googled around a bit and found that someone’s already added ISFOC support to Emacs. And that’s heartening. If they have conversion tables in Elisp, I can easily convert them into Python. Looked a bit more, and found this tool called iconverter which does conversion at the command line. Iconverter is part of the Linux Technology Development for Indian Languages project at IIT Kanpur. It also appears to be written in C, which means I can now just write a Python wrapper module—if it isn’t already done.
More news as I make progress.
The idea behind this is that there is a large base of systems out there that are not Unicode capable. For the sake of users with such systems, Mahiti wants to offer two versions of every Indian language page: one in Unicode and one in ISCII—which is an 8-bit standard—using font encoding. CDAC has released several high quality non-Unicode fonts that we are hoping to use.
Now we’ve found another problem: these fonts aren’t ISCII encoded either. They use another encoding called ISFOC, which varies by script—meaning a separate converter for each script. While CDAC publishes a table of characters, their converters are proprietary.
I was almost resigned to making comparison charts and writing converters myself, but Googled around a bit and found that someone’s already added ISFOC support to Emacs. And that’s heartening. If they have conversion tables in Elisp, I can easily convert them into Python. Looked a bit more, and found this tool called iconverter which does conversion at the command line. Iconverter is part of the Linux Technology Development for Indian Languages project at IIT Kanpur. It also appears to be written in C, which means I can now just write a Python wrapper module—if it isn’t already done.
More news as I make progress.
mannu — Apr 22, 2004 2:54:10 PM — # ↩
Anonymous — Feb 6, 2005 11:59:22 AM — # ↩
Hi, Such a relief to see some one giving a thought to the ISFOC/unicode scenario. Well boss I am in deep trouble I need a utility which I can call up in VB.net to convert a ISFOC String into Unicode and vice-versa. Where can I look to for help. SOS!
regards, Poras Deshmukh (deshmukh.pr@nicwr.mah.nic.in)
Anonymous — Oct 4, 2007 5:14:57 PM — # ↩
get a list of isfoc code n get a list of unicode codes n make a program in vb.net