Unicode Gurmukhi
From SikhiPedia
Microsoft has introduced Punjabi/Gurmukhi support in Windows XP. You could compare this to Chinese/Japanese support. With this support we can make webpages, software, keyboards and devices using Gurmukhi.
For example, if you did't have a Gurmukhi font installed and you were to write your name using a gurmukhi font, it would appear as gibberish, which is just useless if we want to reach a wide audience, the majority of which does not have a gurmukhi font installed, or may have a different font than I am using. But with this new support (known as unicode characters) you can write your name whether you have the font or not.
This is a huge stride for us. With this we can promote Gurmukhi to the masses. Another huge advantage is that search engines cannot understand a Gurmukhi font (like GurbaniLipi or WebAkhar) but ALL search engines support unicode characters, because that is what japanese, chinese, arabic websites all use.
What is Unicode
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. Unicode is the accepted international standard that includes support for all major scripts of the World and is adopted by all current major computer operating systems. This is a 16 bit standard that allows use of more than 65000 characters in one font. It has support for major Indic (Indian) scripts that include Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit), Bengali (Bengali, Assamese), Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Microsoft Windows XP has full support for Indic scripts, including Gurmukhi. All future development regarding scripts will be based on Unicode.
Advantages of Unicode relating to Gurmukhi script
The purpose of this write-up is not to give any detailed information on this topic, but some points are worth mentioning. Migration to Unicode may not be painless as one has to adopt to new ways (but it is not a big deal) and for editing purposes, one has to have a software that has support for Unicode. For example, to edit Gurmukhi Unicode text on Windows XP, MS Word 2003 becomes a necessity. However, there are many advantages in using Unicode text. Documents and web-pages made with Unicode text, when viewed with an appropriate web-browser on a computer with support for Unicode, will always be viewed in the right script even if the font in which web-pages are made is not installed into the system (just as English text is always English, even if the font in which it is made is missing). One can name files and folders in Gurmukhi, search web pages in Gurmukhi, sort text with ease, exchange Gurmukhi data without having to worry about fonts and avoid the hassles of upper-case lower and spacing problems that happen when many available non-Unicode Gurmukhi fonts are used. The implementation of Indic scripts by Unicode has been done as per recommendations by a the Indian government and it is done in such a way that transliteration (phonetic) between Indic scripts will be easy as code points for corresponding characters are well defined. Thus, the Gurbani files made with Unicode fonts can be transliterated into other Indic scripts with ease. You may read more on this topic.