Scripting Indian fonts for computing
Wednesday, 09 April 2003, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: In linguistically diverse India, computing cannot make much progress if local language fonts are not freely available, say some idealistic young men who are trying to solve the problem. They addressed the issue at the national Indic fonts workshop at Bangalore's PES Institute of Technology. "Participants came in even from Nepal and Bangladesh to share their experiences," Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, one of the leaders of the initiative, told IANS. Singh's EkGaon Technologies aims to make technology relevant to the ordinary citizen in a country known for immense software talent coexisting with unvanquished poverty. EkGaon was set up with another idealistic youth, Tapan Parikh. The workshop was the second in a series, and was attended by 36 participants from various languages and technology groups across India, as well as Nepal and Bangladesh. Said Singh, "Indic-Computing Consortium is meant to be a national-level participatory organisation, and a common forum for discussion, information exchange and advocacy on behalf of all parties interested in the development of Indic language computing." Computing in Indian language poses special challenges because of the complex structure of Indian scripts. Computing was geared largely for the English language's relatively simple Roman script, which has just 26 letters compared to the more than 50 letters for the main Indian languages. In September 2002, Bangalore hosted the Indic-Computing workshop that saw different language groups talk to each other on how to jointly solve the complex problems Indian languages face before popping up on your computer screen or getting printed neatly. The campaign's goal: to develop "good looking" fonts that make computer-generated Indian language texts a pleasure to read. This network also wants to use free software or open source tools for rendering and perfecting the fonts. "We need to find font developers for all Indian languages, and make available fonts to be converted to open type fonts," said Singh. During the meet, Maharashtra-based font designer Ravi Pande gave an introduction to Indic scripts, character sets, tools and glyph designs and the testing of glyphs. India has a dozen-and-a-half officially recognised national languages but is believed to have some 1,652 dialects and languages. Of these, over 33 are spoken by over 100,000 people each. Amazing attempts at Indianising computer solutions have been reported across the country. Knoppix, a distribution of GNU/Linux, runs in Malayalam, while a Hindi version of free software was released earlier this year in Pune. To inch their way closer to a solution, the network has built links with computer gurus or designers working in various languages. Regional working groups have been proposed for Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri, Marathi, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Oriya and even Sanskrit. In the case of Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Persian, the group hopes to work with Free/Libre and Open Source Software groups across India and Pakistan.
Source: IANS
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