Nepali Fonts Standard

Nepal Codes for Information Interchange White Paper v2 Font Standardisation Working Committee, 1997 page 5 Table 2: the characters sets and their encodings for Sabdatara and Annapurna. Sabdatara 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 40 50 60 ! " # $ % & ' ( 70 ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 80 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < 90 = > ? @ A B C D E F 100 G H I J K L M N O P 110 Q R S T U V W X Y Z 120 [ \ ] ^ _ ` a s 130 b c d e f g h i j k 140 l t x y m n 150 160 170 180 190 200 210 220 230 240 p q 250 Annapurna 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 40 50 60 ! " # $ % & ' ( 70 ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 80 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < 90 = > ? @ A B C D E F 100 G ( I * K L M N O P 110 Q 2 S 4 U V W X Y Z 120 [ < ] ^ _ ` a = c 130 d f g h i j k l m 140 n o ® q r s t u v w 150 x y z { | } ~ } 160 170 180 190 ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © 200 ª « ¬ ® ¯ ° ± ² ³ 210 ´ µ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ 220 ½ ¾ ¿ À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ 230 Ç © É « Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð 240 Ñ ³ Ó µ Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú 250 Û ¼ Ý ¾ ß à The thing to notice in these code tables is that the same character appears in different positions, and that they encode different character sets. What we want is that all such tables include exactly the same set of characters and that these characters always appear at the same position in the code tables. Also the styles of the characters are different, but that is legitimate and indeed that is precisely what we do want, a range of stylistically different fonts so that we can choose the style that most fits our purpose. India has also been investing much effort in the representation of its own languages in the computer, and with Hindi as the national language and each state having their own state official language, there are 17 different languages all of which are mandated for use on official business in some parts of India. Many individuals and organisations have created representations of Indian languages in the computer following the same ad hoc approach as in Nepal, with character sets and their encoding being peculiar to the supplier, and different from everybody else’s. India has also investigated its own languages and created a standard IS 13194:1991 called ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) for these 17 official languages, but they have not looked at the needs of the Tibeto-Burmese languages that thrive in the hills and mountains of Nepal. ISCII accommodates the writing systems of all 17 languages of India within a single table, exploiting their common origin in Brahmi. An early version of ISCII was adopted by the Unicode Consortium in 1988. ISCII is required by national government but ignored by many people in practice who do things differently. What happens in India is as likely to be determined by events outside India as within, by the products of Microsoft and by the Unicode consortium. But India in its ISCII standard has produced lots of good ideas that Nepal can build upon. The idea underlying ISCII is that the writing systems are phonetic, and the representation within the computer and the way you input it through the keyboard should be guided by this. So what should be focused upon are the pure consonants and vowels, leaving the computer to work out details of how things are written: • the creation of conjuncts using half character glyphs or combined characters in vertically stacked glyphs, • the position of the matras and other diacritics.

Nepali Fonts Standard

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