|Welcome to TSCII web
site. TSCII stands for Tamil Standard Code for
Information Interchange. It was created by a group of
Font developers, vendors, users, Tamil scholars and
enthusiasts, through open net based discussion. Shortly
after the First International Tamil Internet Conference
in Singapore, the participants and several early
internet users joined the mailing list called webmasters
hosted by Bala Pillai's tamil.net. Starting in September
1997, the discussions converged on a set of
specifications detailed at
discussions are archived at
Organizers of this effort created a group called
"Standards for Tamil Computing Group" that hosted the
first TSCII site at http://www.tamil.net/tscii/ that
remains the primary TSCII site even today.
TSCII discussions eventually moved on to
email@example.com and continue the discussions even
today. To subscribe to this discussion send an e-mail to
The primary goal
of STC is to develop and implement a character encoding
standard for Tamil, named TSCII, that will work across
all platforms with the existing software applications.
The members also discuss the standardisation of keyboard
input schemes, and transliteration schemes.
- The core activities can be summarised as
- Defining an 8-bit bilingual character
encoding scheme for Tamil (TSCII) that will work
across all platforms with existing software
- Develop sorting and searching algorithms and
implement them in different applications.
Develop proof-of-concept applications in
different platforms to aid software developers
in implementing TSCII.
- Develop public domain, open source migration
tools that will help users migrate from an
existing encoding to TSCII.