In Devanagari text, the virama or halant sign is used to
- A.lengthen a vowel sound
- B.remove the inherent vowel and allow conjuncts to form
- C.mark the end of a sentence
- D.change a consonant into a digit
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is B, it removes the inherent vowel and allows conjuncts to form. 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 processing. Option A is wrong because vowel length is shown by the vowel sign or matra itself, each of which has its own code point. Option C is wrong because a Devanagari sentence ends with the danda, a vertical bar that has a separate code point in the same block. Option D is wrong because the Devanagari digits are separate characters. Note also the zero width joiner and zero width non-joiner, which force or block a conjunct where the default rendering is not wanted.
Read the full article: Hindi Computing: Unicode, InScript Keyboard and Fonts
Practice Questions
View allThe Unicode standard is maintained by which of the following?
- A.Unicode Consortium
- B.Bureau of Indian Standards
- C.Internet Engineering Task Force
- D.World Wide Web Consortium
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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.
Read the full explanation →In the Unicode standard, the Devanagari block occupies the range
- A.U+0400 to U+047F
- B.U+0600 to U+067F
- C.U+0900 to U+097F
- D.U+0B00 to U+0B7F
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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.
Read the full explanation →ISCII stands for
- A.Indian Script Code for Information Interchange
- B.Indian Standard Code for Internet Information
- C.International Script Code for Indian Interchange
- D.Indic Symbol Code for Information Indexing
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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…
Read the full explanation →InScript, in the context of Indian language computing, is
- A.a Devanagari font
- B.a keyboard layout for Indian scripts
- C.a character encoding standard
- D.a word processing software
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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…
Read the full explanation →Kruti Dev is an example of
- A.a Unicode Devanagari font
- B.a non-Unicode or legacy Devanagari font
- C.an Indian keyboard layout
- D.a transliteration scheme
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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.
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