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Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing theTamil script. The lower 128 codepoints are plainASCII, and 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 theIANA 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, followingISCII, in contrast to the case ofThai, where the visual order encoding grandfathered byTIS-620 was adopted.

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

The need for a common encoding for Tamil was felt by members of various mailing list based forums in the mid-1990s, as there were multiple custom coded fonts were prevalent in those forums. While some of the commercial encodings were popular than the others, they were not accepted by wider community due to conflicting commercial interests. While Unicode was accepted by most as the future standard, most of the desktop systems at that time were still not capable of handling Unicode for Tamil language, and an interim 8-bit encoding was required.

A separate mailing list for discussion of such encodings (webmasters@tamil.net) was created in 1997 to initiate this discussion, starting with an email written byDr.K.Kalyanasundaram to the popular Tamil authorSujatha who headed the committee for standardization of Tamil keyboard.^[2] This forum quickly attracted enthusiastic participants from across the globe, including several prominent Tamil scholars.^{[neutrality isdisputed]} Archives of these discussion are maintained byINFITT.^[3]

Subsequent to publishing TSCII, most of the members of webmasters@tamil.net mailing list became part of INFITT, which is a wider initiative to bring in standardization and continued development in various areas of Tamil computing.

Text encoded in UTF-8 can be converted to TSCII using the GNU iconv tools as follows,

$iconv-futf-8-ttsciihello.utf8>hello.tscii

Whereas conversion from TSCII to UTF-8 is done by interchanging-f and-t flags.

• TACE16 (Tamil All Character Encoding)
• Clip font
• Tamil keyboard
• தமிழ் 99 [ta]
• InScript
• Tamil (Unicode block)
• Tamil blogosphere

• TSCII Start Page
• Unicode Technical Note #15 Text conversion From TSCII 1.7 to Unicode
• INFITT (International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil)
• TSCII to Unicode Online & Webpage Conversion
• Padma – Mozilla extension for transforming TSCII to UnicodeArchived 2019-10-01 at theWayback Machine
• The free etext collection atProject Madurai uses the TSCII encoding, but has already started to provide Unicode versions.
• AnyTaFont2UTF8 – anopen source project for all Tamil encoding/font mapping characters, maintained byIsaiyini Tamil Community

• Tamil character-encoding standards
• Character sets
• Tamil computing

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• Short description is different from Wikidata
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• Articles with minor POV problems from August 2024
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