Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange

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Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing the Tamil script. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are TSCII-specific. After long years of being used on the Internet by private agreement only, it was successfully registered with the IANA in 2007.^[1]

TSCII encodes the characters in visual (written) order, paralleling the use of the Tamil Typewriter. Unicode, instead, uses the logical order encoding strategy for Tamil, following ISCII, in contrast to the case of Thai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered by TIS-620 was adopted.

The government of Tamil Nadu endorses its own TAB/TAM standards for 8-bit encoding and other, older encoding schemes can still be found on the web.

The free etext collection at Project Madurai uses the TSCII encoding, but has already started to provide Unicode versions.