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Indic Script Languages

By Raveesh Gupta - Localization, Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd.
As the software market for India grows, so does the interest in developing products for this market, and Unicode is part of many vendors' solutions. Microsoft is one of those vendors committed to using Unicode to support the Indic-language and, more generally, the worldwide software market. In our implementation experience, we have found many benefits to creating a single worldwide version of product, and Unicode is the reason many of those benefits are available.
However, there are software vendors who see a barrier to implementing Unicode in products for the Indic-language market. This barrier is the perception that deficiencies in Unicode will keep software developers from creating products that are culturally and linguistically appropriate for the Indian market. This perception manifests itself in a number of ways, but one concern that the Indic language community has voiced is the belief that the Unicode character encoding order is not appropriate for linguistic collation (or sorting). This idea that character encoding order in Unicode must be equivalent to linguistic collation of these same scripts and their respective languages is considered by some developers a blocking point to adoption of Unicode in the Indian market, and is indicative of the concern within the Indic-language community about the feasibility of Unicode for their scripts.
The barrier to Unicode adoption does not exist and it is possible to provide properly globalized software for the Indic market with the current implementation of Unicode, using the example of Indic language collation.
A brief history of Indic encodings is given to set the stage for the current mentality regarding Unicode in the Indian market.
The basics of linguistic collation and its application to Indic scripts compared to encoding, and demonstrated as it exists on Windows XP.
The other technologies involved to enable properly globalized software as they pertain to the collation example.
Unicode as an encoding is more than sufficient to support Indic scripts and languages, since it is only one step of many to develop culturally and linguistically appropriate software for India; software vendors must complete the globalization work needed to support Indic scripts and languages.
This is the case already with some software vendors, including Microsoft—Unicode is used in tandem with other technologies (e.g., rendering, input, font support and national language functions) to create a product that is linguistically and culturally appropriate for the Indic-language software market.

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