Unicode

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization devoted to developing, maintaining, promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards. The Unicode Consortium actively develops standards in the area of internationalization including defining the behavior and relationships between Unicode characters. The Consortium works closely with W3C and ISO—in particular with ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC2/WG2, which is responsible for maintaining ISO/IEC 10646, the International Standard synchronized with the Unicode Standard.

The latest electronic version of the Unicode Standard is Version 13.0. This is a consolidated version of the standard, incorporating all changes into the full text - Unicode 13.0 Documentation.

The Unicode Character Standard primarily encodes scripts rather than languages. That is, where more than one language shares a set of symbols that have a historically related derivation, the union of the set of symbols of each such language is unified into a single collection identified as a single script. These collections of symbols (i.e., scripts) then serve as inventories of symbols which are drawn upon to write particular languages. In many cases, a single script may serve to write tens or even hundreds of languages.

The Unicode Consortium also has publications which includes Unicode Standard with its Annexes, Character, Unicode Technical Standards and Reports.

Role of TDIL

TDIL Programme of MeitY is the voting member of the Unicode Consortium to ensure adequate representation of Indian scripts in the Unicode Standard and has been engaged in a dialogue with the UTC about additional characters in the Indic blocks and improvements to the textual descriptions and annotations for representation of 22 constitutionally recognized Indian languages.

The representation of all the 22 constitutionally recognized languages in Unicode Standard is completed. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology identified the required changes in the then Unicode Standard 3.0 for representation of Indian languages in the Unicode Standard. All the required changes have been accepted and incorporated in Unicode Standard. Current improvements in the implementation of Indian scripts based on the Unicode architecture have made the Indian languages available to all over the world.

The objective of preserving our ancient knowledge, MeitY via TDIL Programme, is taking the initiative to encode these historic and archive scripts in Unicode Standard, apart from the 22 constitutionally recognized languages for representation of multilingual text in computer/ electronic media.

For more information please refer Unicode website.