Does Unicode representation allow direct transliteration across Indian languages?
The answer, sadly, is a NO. Transliteration would be correct only when syllables can be properly identified. Unicode values for the aksharas of different languages do not always match in terms of their index within the assigned set of codes. Transliteration will have to be attempted based on the context and should take into account the presence of modifier codes, a near impossible task if the transliterated display should look right and convey the same linguistic content. Even granting that across the Indian scripts one could attempt to use large conversion tables, script specific Unicode assignments will cause difficulties. Worse still, it will not be easy to provide transliteration into Roman with diacritics, something scholars all over the world have used for representing text in different Indian languages. This despite the fact that Unicode supports a full complement of IPA symbols!. Having said so much about the inadequacies of ISCII and Unicode, we should also examine the real fe
