ISCII
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ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) is a coding scheme for representing various Indic scripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used to depict Romanised Indic languages. Most of those scripts are rather similar in structure, but have different letter shapes. So ISCII tries to encode the logical structure of the Indic scripts, while script-specific letter shape are expected to be selected by markup or font specification in rich text. For plain text documents the non-printing ATR character can be used to select script-specific letter shape (this mechanism is similar to the use of escape sequences). The supported scripts are: Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu.
It is claimed that manually switching between scripts will easily achieve automatic transliteration, though this is not always straightforward as the various Indic scripts have incompatibilities among themselves that prevent round-tripping. See About ISCII.
ISCII is a fixed-length 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific.
ISCII has largely been obsoleted by Unicode, which has however attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks. (Unicode has a separate code-point range for each language.)