Siddham in Type, and in the Modern Encoding

Siddham was a manuscript and woodblock script for the whole of its working life, and it came late to movable type and later still to digital text. It now has a block of its own in the Unicode Standard, which means a Siddham text can be stored, searched and transmitted as characters rather than as pictures, and that a scholar can quote a syllable rather than reproducing an image of one.

Encoding a script of this kind involves decisions that are not neutral. The alternate letterforms found in the manuscript record have to be handled somehow, and the Siddham block carries several of them as separate characters, because a text cannot otherwise be represented faithfully. The dependent vowel signs, the nasal and aspiration marks and the cancelling stroke are encoded as marks rather than letters, which matches the tradition. Conjuncts are formed by the rendering software rather than stored as characters, which is how the whole Brahmic family is handled.

The practical result is that this atlas can carry the actual character for each letter rather than a description of it. Not every script is so fortunate: a living liturgical script with no Unicode allocation has to be shown as a drawn outline instead, with the character column left empty, because storing a lookalike from another script would assert an identity that does not exist.