Computer Awareness Quiz: Hindi Computing: Unicode, InScript Keyboard and Fonts

The correct answer is A, the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit body of software companies, governments and individual experts that publishes the Unicode Standard, assigns code points to characters and releases a new version with new scripts and symbols from time to time.

This block of 128 code points holds the Devanagari consonants and independent vowels, the dependent vowel signs or matras, the virama, the nukta, the danda and double danda, and the Devanagari digits; characters added later sit in a separate Devanagari Extended block.

ISCII was adopted by the Bureau of Indian Standards as IS 13194 in 1991; it is an 8-bit code whose lower 128 positions are the same as ASCII and whose upper 128 positions carry an Indian script, a single table serving ten scripts because they share the phonetic order inherited…

InScript, short for Indian Script, is the standard layout notified by the Government of India and built into Windows, Linux, macOS and Android; it places vowels and matras under the left hand and consonants under the right in the dictionary order of the script, so the same layout works for…

Kruti Dev places Devanagari glyphs on the code positions of English letters, so the computer stores ordinary ASCII characters while the reader sees Hindi; open the file on a machine without that font and the text appears as meaningless Roman letters and symbols, and it cannot be searched or indexed.

The correct answer is A, Mangal, the Devanagari Unicode font shipped with Windows and the font that government typing tests pair with the InScript layout; later Windows versions also carry Nirmala UI, Aparajita, Kokila and Utsaah as Unicode Devanagari fonts.

UTF-8 is a variable width encoding: code points up to U+007F take one byte, the next range takes two bytes, code points from U+0800 up to the end of the Basic Multilingual Plane take three bytes, and anything beyond that plane takes four.

Standard ASCII uses seven bits, and two raised to the power seven is 128, which covers the uppercase and lowercase English letters, the ten digits, punctuation and thirty-three control characters.

Every Devanagari consonant carries an inherent short vowel, and the virama cancels it, giving the bare consonant; when a bare consonant is followed by another consonant the rendering engine joins the two into a conjunct or half form, which is why the virama is the key character in Devanagari text…

The Technology Development for Indian Languages programme, known as TDIL, develops and distributes fonts, dictionaries, corpora, optical character recognition, speech and machine translation tools for Indian languages, and it maintains a data centre from which these resources are shared.

The correct answer is A, C-DAC, Pune, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which besides building India's PARAM series of supercomputers created the GIST range of Indian language technology, including the add-on card and software that let ordinary computers display and print Indian scripts, and the LEAP Office suite…