Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Monday, Sep 04, 2006
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Sep 04, 2006 |
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Government
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E-Governance States - Tamil Nadu Maran urges paper on 16-bit Tamil encoding system Our Bureau
The Tamil SMS (short messaging service) facility could be utilised better under the 16-bit system.
MR DAYANIDHI MARAN
Chennai , Sept. 3 The Communications and IT Minister, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, has urged the Tamil Nadu Virtual University to come up with a paper on implementing the newly developed 16-bit encoding system for Tamil language computing by December. The national e-governance project would commence in January 2007 and submitting the paper in December would help enforce the 16-bit encoding as the standard for Tamil, he said. "We need to have one Tamil coding scheme that is user-friendly, else it will not become popular. Also, let there be no proprietary right on the encoding so that more people can access it," he said. He also suggested developing similar encoding systems for other Indian languages. Called TUNE (Tamil Unicode New Encoding), the 16-bit encoding system stored data differently. Every sound has one storage unit as opposed to two or three units that the existing 8-bit encoding system has. For instance, the sound "Kaa", comprising "Ka" and "Aa" will be stored as one unit in 16-bit encoding versus the two units it is stored as in the 8-bit system. This will save storage space, Prof N. Balakrishnan, Associate Director, Indian Institute of Science, told Business Line. Options like store, search and sort would become simpler with TUNE, he said. The Tamil SMS (short messaging service) facility could be utilised better under the 16-bit system. Currently, an English SMS transmits 160 characters a message while a Tamil SMS transmits 70 characters. With TUNE, Tamil SMS can also transmit 160 characters a message. Asked if keyboards needs to be changed to implement TUNE, Prof Balakrishnan said, "No. We only need to change the software to align the keys with the TUNE system and that is easy."
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