Vedic Characters & Unicode

[Christopher John Fynn]

The Vedic signs (double udatta etc.), currently have no representation in the
Unicode and ISO 10646 standards - though several people have mentioned to me at
various times that there is a real need for these characters in order to
represent Vedic texts.

The only way to see these characters encoded in the Unicode and ISO 10646
standards is for a formal proposal to encode these characters put forward to the
Unicode Consortium and/or to ISO/IEC 10646 JTC1/SC2/WG2.  For information on how
to make such a proposal to the Unicode Consortium see:
http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html . Making such a proposal to
ISO/IEC 10646 JTC1/SC2/WG2 should be done through your national standards body.

If  no one else wants to volunteer to do the work of making such a proposal,
I'm willing to it myself since I'm familiar with the process and am a member of
BSI IST2, the UK committee represented on ISO/IEC 10646 JTC1/SC2/WG2.  However
I'm not a Sanskritist and don't have any information on these characters. If any
subscribers to this list know of source(s) where these characters and their use
is thoroughly documented (pref. in English) perhaps you could let me know. (A
photocopy or PDF file of such a source or sources would be even more helpful).

Unless and until these characters are included in the Unicode and ISO 10646
standards there will be no proper support for them in the Unicode based Indic
language systems currently being implemented in Windows 2000, Mac OS, X-Windows
and other operating environments - nor will there be a proper, standards based,
way of representing such characters in HTML, XML etc.

Best Regards

- Chris

Christopher J Fynn
cfynn at dircon.co.uk
4 Chester Court
84 Salusbury Road
London NW6 6PA
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)181 537 6762