The Uncompromised Solution for Sinhala

This web site showcases the best and most stable and natural solution for Sinhala on the computer. It is stable because it is safe from careless mangling of the language by disinterested bureaucrats in Sri Lanka, and Unicode Consortium imposing its rules based on misinformation.

It connects seamlessly with the oldest technological solution for Sinhala: PTS transliteration of Sinhala developed in the 1860s. It also round-trip translates between Unicode Sinhala while correcting deliberate errors introduced by SLS1134 and the Sinhala Unicode code page itself.

Dual-script Sinhala shares the same code space with English and some thirteen other Western European languages that Open Type standard lists as languages under the Latin 'Simple' script. This code space is the ISO-8859-1 character set, also referred to as Single-byte Code Space (SBCS) or Latin-1.

The power of SBCS is that it makes up the core essential part of Unicode Character Database, and is the most stable part in it. It is not a system shrouded in esoteric technical terms that some seem to cause ambiguity in the English language. Sinhala is also relieved from being an Abugida, a type of language relegated to the sideline as seen as not admitting of a comprehensive solution on the computer.

This solution is called Dual-script Sinhala because it never degrades into garbage as it happens to Unicode Sinhala (Double-byte Sinhala) as when seen outside Sri Lanka. In the absence of a Sinhala smartfont, the text gracefully falls back to readable Romanized Sinhala.

If you care about Sinhala or any Indic language, you ought to check out the Sinhala side of this web side and especially the 'liyanna' page on it. That page presents two utilities built out of Dual-script Sinhala: The first one allows you to convert Sinhala from Dual-script to Unicode Sinhala. The other uses the Sort function of the JavaScript language extended to sort Sinhala according to the Hodiya.