Design team of Lipi at Udaipur has recently developed support for Unicode in T6050/T6100/T6215/T6218 for English, Devnagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil & Telugu languages

CONCEPT - UNICODE :

Fundamentally, computers or peripherals deal with codes. Letters and other characters are stored and transmitted as unique code. 

In ASCII (American Standard Code for Information interchange) table, character 'A' is represented as code 41 (Hexadecimal). Similarly Hindi character 'Aa' is having code A4 (Hex) in ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information interchange).

There are different tables (or encoding sets) available for different countries to represent various characters or letters. No single table contain enough characters. For example, the European Union alone requires several different tables to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single table was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, & technical symbols in common use.

The Unicode Standard is the universal character encoding standard used for representation of letters and characters for computer processing. It defines codes for characters used in the major languages available today. Scripts include the European alphabetic scripts, Middle Eastern and scripts of Asia.

UNICODE provides following three encoding formats :

In Unicode (UTF-16) Hindi character 'Aa' will have two byte code 09 05. First byte 09 denotes Devnagari character set and second byte 05 is the code for character 'v'.

UTF-8 is popular for HTML and similar protocols. UTF-8 is a way of transforming all Unicode characters into a variable length encoding of bytes.

In Unicode (UTF-8) Hindi character 'aav' will have code E0 A4 85. 

COMPATIBILITY OF LIPI LMPs :

With this recent development Line Matrix Printers from Lipi are compatible with following encoding sets : 

To activate Unicode encoding system, you have to either select DV-UNI under OPER-Charset menu on the control panel of the printer or send software command from the system. Printer is intelligent enough to automatically sense the encoding format of the Unicode.

Speed in all above encoding system will be same and equal to what we get with ISCII.

BENEFITS OF UNICODE :

Application software which is capable of generating UNICODE can be used for printing on our LMPs.

Windows 2000 from Microsoft supports UNICODE. Application software like Notepad, Wordpad are having option to save file in UNICODE format for Devnagari, Tamil & English and can be printed directly on our Line Matrix Printers. No special software or hardware is needed to generate file in Unicode format.