Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533

Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533, commonly referred to as TIS-620, is the most common character set and character encoding for the Thai language. The standard is published by the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), an organ of the Ministry of Industry under the Royal Thai Government, and is the sole official standard for encoding Thai in Thailand. The descriptive name of the standard is "Standard for Thai Character Codes for Computers" (Thai: รหัสสำหรับอักขระไทยที่ใช้กับคอมพิวเตอร์). "2533" refers to year 2533 of the Buddhist Era (1990), the year the present version of the standard was published; a previous revision, TIS 620-2529 (1986), is now obsolete.

tructure

TIS-620 is a conventionally structured Extended ASCII national character set that retains full compatibility with 7-bit ASCII and uses the 8-bit range hex A1 to FB for encoding the Thai alphabet. Due to the complex combining nature of Thai vowels and diacritics, TIS-620 is intended for information interchange only, and an additional display engine is required to compose characters correctly.

Variants

A nearly identical version of TIS-620 has been adopted as ISO 8859-11 in 1999, the sole difference being that ISO 8859-11 defines hex A0 as a non-breaking space, while TIS-620 leaves it undefined but reserved. (In practice, this small distinction is usually ignored.)

The ISO 8859-11 set has also been registered as ISO-IR-166 by Ecma International, but this variation adds explicit escape codes for signaling the beginning and end of Thai character sequences.

The TIS-620 character set ordering has been used essentially as is within Unicode (ISO 10646) as well. Unicode's Thai range is U+0E01 through U+0E7F, and TIS-620 Thai characters can be converted to UTF-16 simply by prefixing each byte with 0E and subtracting hex A0 from the value.

Codepage layout

TIS-620
	x0	x1	x2	x3	x4	x5	x6	x7	x8	x9	xA	xB	xC	xD	xE	xF
0x	"unused"
1x
2x	SP	!	"	#	$	%	&	'	(	)	*	+	,	-	.	/
3x	num|0	num|1	num|2	num|3	num|4	num|5	num|6	num|7	num|8	num|9	:	;	<	=	>	?
4x	@	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O
5x	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z				^	_
6x	`	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o
7x	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z	{	|	}	~
8x	"unused"
9x
Ax		ก	ข	ฃ	ค	ฅ	ฆ	ง	จ	ฉ	ช	ซ	ฌ	ญ	ฎ	ฏ
Bx	ฐ	ฑ	ฒ	ณ	ด	ต	ถ	ท	ธ	น	บ	ป	ผ	ฝ	พ	ฟ
Cx	ภ	ม	ย	ร	ฤ	ล	ฦ	ว	ศ	ษ	ส	ห	ฬ	อ	ฮ	ฯ
Dx	ะ	ั	า	ำ	ิ	ี	ึ	ื	ุ	ู	ฺ					฿
Ex	เ	แ	โ	ใ	ไ	ๅ	ๆ	็	่	้	๊	๋	์	ํ	๎	๏
Fx	๐	๑	๒	๓	๔	๕	๖	๗	๘	๙	๚	๛

"You may need to set your text size to about 200% to see all the characters"

In the table above, 20 is the regular SPACE character. Code values 00-1F, 7F, 80-9F, A0, DB-DE and FC-FF are not assigned to characters by TIS-620.

Code values D1, D4-DA, E7-EE are combining characters.

External links

* [http://www.nectec.or.th/it-standards/std620/std620.htm Official reference] (in Thai)
* Announcement in Royal Gazette of [http://www.ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/DATA/PDF/2533/D/140/6318.PDF TIS 620-2533] and [http://www.ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/DATA/PDF/2529/D/102/2720.PDF TIS 620-2529]
* [http://mozart.inet.co.th/cyberclub/trin/thairef/tis620-iso10646.html Mapping of TIS-620 to ISO 10646] (not authoritative)