Before 1998 Sinhala fonts were designed based on ASCII which was very different from current Unicode standards. Designing a Sinhala font was not very easy task because of the larger number of different characters the languages possessed (around 1200 different characters) and most of the time they differs largely from each other. With the initiative of the people like Mr. Pushpananda Ekanayake who was a Sinhala font designer, lot of ASCII Sinhala fonts were designed by overcoming those issues during 90’s.
Unicode was introduced to the world in 1989 in order to have a consistent encoding mechanism among every language in the world and during 90’s Unicode evolved rapidly in the world and ASCII fonts was deprecated. But in Sri Lanka Unicode was approved in 1998 and the transaction from Sinhala ASCII font to Sinhala Unicode font did not happen as expected. Most probably it's due to the fact that creating a Unicode font needs more technical knowledge than ASCII font. Therefore “Iscola Potha” is the only Sinhala Unicode font available vastly online and offline publishers. All the major Sinhala publishers still uses ASCII Sinhala fonts due this. Using ASCII fonts is a problem when it comes to indexing used by search engines. Therefore Sinhala content on web will be not cached by web browsers enforcing a massive limitation of knowledge based on Sinhala articles. And also ASCII text cannot be translated to another language using automatic translators. Therefore we need to push towards Sinhala Unicode font designing.
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