Most European languages are written in Latin script. The world has more than 50 written scripts with different characteristics.

In SLASCII, lower 128 code points had the Latin character set encoded and the upper code points had the supporting of the Sinhala character set. Following in the footsteps of India, Sri Lanka had also released the Sri Lankan Standard Code for Information Interchange (SLASCII) in 1990. India released the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), an eight-bit code supporting several Indian character sets such as Assamease, Bengali, Devanagri, Gujarati, Marati, Malayalam, Tamil, Telagu etc. American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), also known as ISO 646 group of standards, was a seven-bit character encoding which was developed in 1964 and released its first version in 1967 to store a Latin Character set.īased on ASCII, several other countries also released similar standards for their countries. Unicode Standard or Universal Encoding Standardīefore the introduction of the Unicode Standard, numerous encoding standards which were unique to each language or group of languages had been introduced worldwide.

The objective of this article is to present an introduction to Unicode while paying attention to SLS 1134 Third Revision which provides the standard for input of Sinhala using the Wijesekera Keyboard. All these are great achievements not known by the ordinary public using Sinhala on their computers, which would not have been possible without Unicode. It was last year that I co-chaired ICANN Sinhala Generation Panel of ICANN to release rules for top level domains in Sinhala. Sri Lanka created history in 2011 by releasing Non-Latin Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) “ලංකා” and “.இலங்கை” and they are now active ccTLDs for the last eight years managed by the LK Domain Registry. Theekshana R&D and the Language Technology Research Laboratory (LTRL) of University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) have been working on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text to Speech for more than 10 years and this research output is about to be released as commercial products. Spell checkers are already developed, and grammar checkers are also on the way for Sinhala.

Sinhala can be stored with any other script in parallel in a document and a list of Sinhala words can be sorted and arranged according Sinhala collation sequence like any other Latin Script, and it has become an ordinary day to day occurrence that data in Sinhala is stored in a Database Management Systems (DBMS) like data in English. Sinhala had taken a long and arduous computerisation journey, in the outcome of which it stands on its own shoulder to shoulder with English in the operations of Sinhala Script on computers. Sinhala and Tamil are categorised under complex scripts at the time Unicode technology was created to render them on computers.

Sinhala fonts