Unicode Nepali Typing

What is Unicode?

Unicode is an international encoding standard for assigning a unique numeric value to letters, digits, and symbols of different languages and scripts. Using Unicode minimizes the conflicts caused by incompatible encoding systems. The most commonly used Unicode standard is UTF-8, which uses one byte for any ASCII character.

The latest version of Unicode contains more than 128,000 characters covering 135 modern as well as historic scripts and multiple symbol sets.

What is Nepali Unicode?

Nepali Unicode is a set of unique numeric values assigned to render Nepali letters, digits, and symbols. Before Nepali Unicode, various Nepali fonts such as Himali, Preeti, and Kantipur were used to type Nepali documents.

Since these fonts used Devanagari letters as pictorial representations, they caused many complications when transferring data from one computer to another. Unless the same font was installed on the receiving computer, Nepali text would not display correctly, and data processing such as sorting, spell checking, and find-and-replace was not possible.

These issues were resolved after the release of Nepali Unicode in 2002 by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya.

Support for Nepali Unicode

In Microsoft applications, Nepali Unicode is supported on Windows 2000 and above. Only Office XP and newer versions support Unicode Nepali. On the other hand, almost all Linux distributions support Unicode by default.