indic-computing-users — Discussing the usage of indian language capable tools

[Indic-computing-users] Conference: Open Source a case for E-Governance

[Vijay P. S. A. <vi...@ek...>]

Hi, I hope you guys are aware of this conference, apologies for cross 
posting.

best

vijay

Open Source: A Case for e-Government
Washington, DC
October 16 - 18, 2002

October 16, 2002 Marvin Center George Washington University Grand Ballroom
800 21st St. NW (on the corner of 21st and H Sts. NW; across from Tower
Records)
October 17-18, 2002 The World Bank IFC Auditorium
2121 Pennsylvania Avenue

The Information for Development program (infoDev) of the World Bank, the
Cyberspace Policy Institute of The George Washington University, and the
Sustainable Development Networking Programme of the United Nations
Development Program are pleased to invite you to a conference on "Open
Source: A Case for e-Government" to be held in Washington, DC, USA,
October 16 - 18, 2002. The aim of the conference is to raise awareness and
to share experiences among policy makers, donors, users/consumers,
universities, and industry specialists in Open Source, e-Government and
related fields. The conference will draw participants from local, national
and international organizations from both the public and private sector.
The core sessions of the conference will focus on:
-- Open Source and e-Government in developed and developing countries (how
governments and local authorities are benefiting from using Open Source)
-- Open Source vs. Proprietary Software (what is the proper role of each
in e-Government)
-- Demonstrations of Open Source Projects (LinuxTM, OpenOffice, MozillaTM,
GNOME, MySQL)
-- Open Source and the Security of the Critical Information Infrastructure
-- Open Source in Training IT Professionals, and its Implications for
Competition, Job Creation and the Software Industry
-- Business Cases: The Economics of Using Open Source Software and Total
Cost of Ownership

Please visit the website www.egovos.org for further information. As this
is an invitation only event, you must be registered to attend. You may
register online by visiting the conference website and kindly note that
all registrations must be received no later than October 11, 2002. Given
the fact that this conference is a registration free event, we are not in
a position to support travel and accommodation expenses for the
participants.

We hope that you will join us for what promises to be an exciting event.
Please complete the registration form as per the instructions in the
conference website. Feel free to contact us in the case of any questions
or concerns at (202) 994-5513.

---
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Re: [Indic-computing-users] Sun and Indian Languages

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

Sun has an agreement with wipro, bangalore , to have some developers
at wipro work on Gnome project. Though I dont think it involves
localisation work.

Also of importance in STSF project from Sun. A typeface rendering
framework. http://stsf.sourceforge.net/

www.Li18nux.net is also majorly supported by Sun.

Regards,
Karunakar


On Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:04:50 +0530 (IST)
ve...@vs... wrote:

> I am forwaring this on behalf of Rajkumar.
> 
> Venky
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 12:06:30 -0700
> From: Prabhat <pra...@su...>
> To: Rajkumar S <ra...@li...>
> Cc: nav...@su...
> Subject: Re:
> 
> hi rajkumar,
> 
> That's great. Actually, we are not doing localization yet but
> concentrating on internationalization. We at Sun are contributing to
> multiple open-source projects for indian languages:
> 
> A> Mozilla
> B> OpenOffice
> C> XIM/IIIM (Input method)
> D> X11/Gnome
> 
> We have completed indian language enabling on most of the
> above-mentioned. If you can help with localization, that would be
> well appreciated. Let me know what you do and how you can help.
> 
> prabhat
> 

[Indic-computing-users] Language activities at IIIT Hyderabad

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

Language Activities of LTRC, IIIT Hyd.

http://www.iiit.net/ltrc/index.html

Stuff available for download
http://www.iiit.net/ltrc/downloads.html
    #  Font Converters
    * Font converter allows you to do the following: If you have texts
which are font specific, you can convert them to ISCII (standard
character coding scheme) or to another font.
    # Dictionaries (both download & lookup)
    * You can download the entire dictionary or you can look up the
meaning of a word.
    # Morphological Analysers
    * Morphological analyser allows you to get the analysis(The
analysis gives the root and other features such as gender, number,
tense etc.) of the word.
    # Anusaarakas
    * Anusaaraka is a computer software which renders text from one
Indian language into another.
    # ISCII Plug-ins
    * You can use this to view the texts in Indian script of your
choice.
    # Classical Hindi Literature
    * These pages offer the writings of Meera, Suradas, Tulasidas,
Premchand,Rahim etc.

Anusaaraka
http://www.iiit.net/ltrc/Anusaaraka/anu_home.html

Anusaaraka is a computer software which renders text from one Indian
language into another. It produces output which is comprehensible
to the reader, although at times it might sound odd. For example,
a Telugu to Hindi anusaaraka can take a Telugu text and produce
output in Hindi which can be understood by a Hindi reader. However,
the reader will require some amount of training for reading the
output.

Regards,
Karunakar

[Indic-computing-users] LDC

[Kalika B. <ka...@pi...>]

Here's the site of Linguistic Data Consortium for those who are 
interested:

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/

Currently, they only have TIMIT speech corpora for Hindi and Tamil.

Kalika 

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kalika Bali                             Picopeta Simputers Pvt Ltd
Specialist - Language Technology        146 5th Cross
e-mail: ka...@pi...             RMV Ext
phone: (080) 361 0567                   Bangalore - 560080

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Indic-computing-users] Sun and Indian Languages

[<ve...@vs...>]

I am forwaring this on behalf of Rajkumar.

Venky
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 12:06:30 -0700
From: Prabhat <pra...@su...>
To: Rajkumar S <ra...@li...>
Cc: nav...@su...
Subject: Re:

hi rajkumar,

That's great. Actually, we are not doing localization yet but
concentrating on internationalization. We at Sun are contributing to
multiple open-source projects for indian languages:

A> Mozilla
B> OpenOffice
C> XIM/IIIM (Input method)
D> X11/Gnome

We have completed indian language enabling on most of the
above-mentioned. If you can help with localization, that would be well
appreciated. Let me know what you do and how you can help.

prabhat

Rajkumar S wrote:

>hello Prabhat,
>
>I am Rajkumar, one of the member of Indic computing initiative. Indic
>computing project <http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net> is a group of
>volunteers interested in enabling computing in Indian languages. One of
>the stated aims of our project is to reach out to other groups both
>commercial as well as volunteer and to work with them to avoid duplication
>of work and to make better use of scarce resources available.
>
>
>I had a chance to talk to Naveen Gangadhar about the work Sun is doing in
>localization, and he referred me to you. It will be interesting to know
>more about the work you are doing and we are also interested to help you
>out where ever possible.
>
>raj
>
>
>

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Working Groups

[Kalika B. <ka...@pi...>]

On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Hema A Murthy wrote:

> > 
> > > * Linguistics Group - Look at various deeper issues that arise out of
> > > the Languages Working Group, to identify better and more appropriate
> > > translations, encodings, representations etc.
> > > Members: Kalika (Kalika - We need more linguists!  Where does one find
> > > them?)
> > 
> > Kalika, to add to Tapan's suggestion, perhaps you could write to the Central
> > Language Research Institute at Mysore and find out if they are interested?
> > Would they be able to help us with all the Indian languages? This could be
> > followed up by myself or one of the organizers meeting them the next time we
> > are in Bangalore.
> This is the the e-mail address of Dr. Udaya Narain .. o f CIIL .  He is 
> the director of CIIL.  He is very enthusiastic but would like to work in
> a project mode - he would like projects given to CIIL with funding support
> identified.
> 
> ud...@ci...
> 
> I personally think that the Indic effort does require a political will -
> I think WE MUST talk to the Om Vikas' and others and ensure that we
> get govt. funding for this.  
> 
> -hema
> 


Hi,
 sorry for not replying earlier,
 was out of town and not checking my mail. I think you should definitley 
involve people at IIIT hyderabad. They are doing a lot of work on all 
kinds of indic-language related projects. The e-mail of Dr. Rajiv Sangal 
is:

<sa...@ii...>

some other people who are working in LTRC in IIIT worth getting in touch 
with are :

Linguistics: Dr. Dipti Mishra Sharma  <di...@ii...>  
Computer Science: Dr. Vineet Chaitanya <vc...@ii...>
 and for speech technologies: Prahallad Kishore <ki...@ii...>


JNU and Delhi University have some people in Linguistics dept. who might 
be interested.

One person you could contact in DU is Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya. I don't 
have his official e-mail id but his yahoo one is : 
<bha...@ya...>

And in JNU, you could contact Dr. Anvita Abbi  <an...@jn...>
and Dr. Ayesha Kidwai <ay...@jn...>

 We could also post on the linguistlist for others around the world who 
might be interested:

www.linguistlist.org

tnx,
Kalika


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kalika Bali                             Picopeta Simputers Pvt Ltd
Specialist - Language Technology        146 5th Cross
e-mail: ka...@pi...             RMV Ext
phone: (080) 361 0567                   Bangalore - 560080

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Indic-computing-users] TUG 2002: Fonts, TeX, Indianisation, Kerala, etc...

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

eceived from CVR... 
Radhakrishnan CV <cv...@ri...>


TUG 2002: A Report from God's Own Country

KG Kumar, Indian TeX Users Group


For the 33 delegates from 13 countries who gathered at Trivandrum, the
capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, for TUG 2002, the
ambience of the environs and the deliberations at the sessions only
served to reinforce this year's theme: Stand up and be proud of
TeX!

To which, the local hosts, TUGIndia or the Indian TeX Users Group,
had added the teasing rider: After all, you are heading for God's Own
Country!  That phrase may have seemed like marketing overkill for most
TeXies who had never before heard of Kerala, but the moment they
landed in Trivandrum -- or Thiruvananthapuram, to give the
tongue-twisting name of the city in the local language, Malayalam --
most knew that this was some form of paradise. Especially when they
first glimpsed the idyllic setting of their place of temporary abode,
Hotel Samudra, at Kovalam, a seagull's wing-tip away from the rolling
surf of the Arabian sea.

Minds and bodies suitably relaxed after various trans-continental
flights, it only remained to see whether the sessions of the 23rd
Annual Meeting of TUG would live up to their promise, as advertised in
the pre-conference mailers and Web postings. Many of the delegates had
battled initial misgivings to travel to India, as several countries
had put out negative travel advisories, prompted by the political
tensions in the subcontinent.  In fact, at one early point in the
run-up to the conference, there were strong doubts whether TUG 2002
would actually happen at all.

So it was with more than idle curiosity that the delegates trooped
into the airconditioned mini-bus on Wednesday, 4 September for the
40-minute ride from Hotel Samudra to the Park Center, Technopark, the
modern, state-of-the-art electronics technology park that was to be
the venue for the three-day conference.

But most delegates were too busy taking in (and storing digitally!)
the sights of the green countryside they had to traverse, to bother
with syntax highlighting and server-side compilation! And when they
did land outside the Park Center, where they were joined by the other
delegates staying in a city hotel, most of whom had attended the
pre-conference tutorials from 1 to 3 September. Were they in for some
surprise! Waiting to greet them, all bedecked in a cape with the TUG
2002 logo, was a little elephant! Talk about life imitating art. Who
would have imagined the very Indian elephant on top of which Duane
Bibby's TeX lion and METAFONT lioness were happily perched would
actually be there in the flesh, gobbling bananas and swaying his trunk
in joy?! A couple of intrepid delegates clambered on top of the
elephant for a short ride, while most others remained content feeding
it bananas and taking snaps.

Also present to welcome the delegates was a team performing the
panchavadyam, Kerala's traditional five-instrument musical ensemble,
which built up to a crescendo as the delegates entered the Park
Center.  Appropriately enough, a couple of the foreign male delegates
were clad in dhotis, the traditional sarong-like attire of Kerala,
while the odd lady did try out a salwar-kameez or a saree!

Day One

Suitably localised, the delegates were treated to a brief opening
ceremony at a session chaired by Sebastian Rahtz, before Ajit Ranade
of ABN-Amro Bank, Mumbai, India talked to them about the status of
TeX in India, where software contributes to 2 per cent of the
national Gross Domestic Product.  He also pointed out that all 13 of
the Indic scripts can be typeset in TeX, but only 10 of the 5,000
fonts are free.

That set the tone for the next presentation by S. Rajkumar of Linuxense
Information Systems, Trivandrum, India, who talked about the processing of
Unicode text to produce high-quality typeset material for Indic scripts
using Opentype fonts.

Continuing the focus on the Indian subcontinent, Amitabh Trehan of the
Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Delhi, India,
narrated the experiences of his team in typesetting in Hindi, Sanskrit
and Persian. They had recently published the first Indian-language
book totally typeset in LaTeX, using the devnag package, later,
also incorporating the sanskrit and ArabTeX packages.

In her paper, Gy\"ongyi Bujdos\'o of the University of Debrecen, Hungary,
dealt with how the Hungarian TeX Users Group (MaTeX) has resumed
the localization of LaTeX for the Hungarian language, keeping in
mind the specialities of Hungarian grammar, like hyphenation, and
handling definite articles and suffixes. By the time Gyongyi had got
to plans for designing special Hungarian ligatures and new fonts,
everyone had built up a reasonably good appetite!

Thankfully for the organizers, the first lunch of TUG 2002 proved to be a
hit, with most of the delegates preferring to polish off the local Indian
dishes, and giving the continental offerings a wide berth! There weren't
too many complaints about levels of spice either, normally the scarier
side of Indian cuisine for the average foreign visitor.

The post-lunch session was kicked off by Satish Babu, Chair of the TUG
2002 Organizing Committee who, while admitting that he was preaching to
the converted, nevertheless went on to give an Indian perspective of the
free software model, and how a poor country like India can use it as a key
enabler in the development process.

In his talk on ``The Tao of Fonts'', Wlodzimierz Bzyl of the University
of Gdansk, Poland, searched through Yin and Yang symbols and I Ching
hexagrams for answers to such questions as: Why are there so many
variations of letter-like shapes? How were these achieved? And what
are the other ways of getting them?

In the last talk of the day, Roozbeh Pournader of the Sharif
University of Technology, Tehran, Iran set his sights on ``Unicode, the
Moving Target''.  He stressed the recently introduced features of
Unicode, now over a decade in development, and pointed out how the
TeX community has remained largely ignorant of the moving target,
preferring to stick to its own special formats and traditions. He also
specified new requirements for the Omega typesetting system, to make
it usable for standard renderings.

Which, predictably enough, drew some sharp observations from John Plaice
of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and primary author of the
Omega (and now, Omega 2) project, billed as the successor of TeX.

In fact, all the lectures were followed by brief Q\&A sessions, which often
had to spill over to the lunch and tea breaks. Needless to add, these
bouts helped renew several old passions, while igniting many more new
ones!

Back at the Hotel Samudra, Kaveh Bazargan of Focal Image Ltd., UK, and
Member of the TUG 2002 Organizing Committee, had arranged for a live
demo of kalari payattu, the traditional Kerala martial arts form, on
the lawns of the hotel, just before dinner. Introducing the show,
Dominik Wujastyk of University College, London, explained some of the
salient aspects of the art form and its significance to the
development of other Asian forms like karate and kung fu.

Day Two

Thursday, 5 September managed to squeeze in one more speaker to the
day's list, taking it up to a total of eight lectures. The day began
with an invited keynote talk by Hans Hagen of Pragma, Netherlands, who
illustrated the fact that TeX can meet many of the demands of
modern publishing, especially thanks to the tight integration of the
ConTeXt macro package with METAPOST. With ConTeXt becoming
XML-aware, users can now comfortably mix XML and TeX techniques, he
pointed out.

David Kastrup of Bochum, Germany, in his lecture, revisited WYSIWYG
paradigms for authoring LaTeX, highlighting input manipulation
tools, including editors like TeXMACS and LyX, and page-oriented
previews like Whizzy-TeX and Instant Preview. Kastrup's own
preview-latex package offers better coupling by placing previews of
small elements into the source buffer.

In the third talk of the day, Ross Moore of Macquaire University,
Sydney, Australia, elaborated on how serendiPDF makes it easier to
find the correct way to express complicated mathematics, especially
aligned environments, using LaTeX. The existence of extra
(initially hidden) mathematical fields within PDF documents helps
solve the problem of how to search for pieces of mathematics within
typeset documents, he said.

Just before lunch, Stephen M. Watt of the University of Western
Ontario, Canada, lectured on conserving implicit mathematical
semantics in conversion between TeX and MathML. Several efforts
have been made to design software to convert mathematical expressions
from TeX to MathML and vice versa. Unlike the standard approach of
expanding macros and then translating from low-level TeX to MathML,
Watt's approach is to map macros in one setting to corresponding
macros in another, thus conserving implied semantics.

After lunch, Karel Piska of the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech
Republic, presented his paper on converting public Indic fonts from
METAFONT into PostScript Type 1 format with the TeXTRACE program
developed by Peter Szabo in 2001. For TUG 2002, Piska prepared a
collection of PostScript Type 1 Indic fonts corresponding to their
METAFONT sources from CTAN.

In a joint presentation on FarsiTeX and the Iranian community,
Behdad Esfahbod and Roozbeh Pournader of the Sharif University of
Technology, Tehran, Iran, dwelt on the history, technicalities and
future of FarsiTeX, the bilingual Persian/English localized version
of LaTeX that meets the minimum requirements of Persian
mathematical and technical typography. The FarsiTeX project team is
working on a new release with PostScript Type 1 fonts, as well as
including Unicode support and integration with Omega, Esfahbod and
Pournader said.

Denis Roegel of LORIA, France, presented a paper on the METAOBJ system
and its features for the implementation of very high-level objects
within METAPOST. He first dealt with the usual low-level way of
drawing within METAPOST, and then described a functional approach to
drawing and how objects can be implemented.

In the last lecture of the day, Karel Skoupy proposed a new
typesetting language and system architecture to overcome the
oversimplified type system of TeX and the incomplete set of TeX
primitives. Skoupy's future typesetting system will be composed of
flexible components that can support multiple inputs (TeX, XML) and
output formats (DVI, PostScript, PDF) and different font types.

The second day of TUG 2002 ended with the official -- and sumptuous --
conference dinner at Hotel Samudra, which was preceded by a
song-and-dance show by a group of homeless children from the Sri
Chitra Home for the Poor and Destitute, Trivandrum, as well as a flute
recital of classical Carnatic music by V. C. George. Both these
offerings were greatly enjoyed by the delegates, many of whom posed
alongside the performers for souvenir photographs.

Many also lingered on long after the performances and dinner, to
savour the cool breeze from the sea, late into the night, emboldened
by the fact that the next day, Friday, would be a relatively easygoing
day, with no official sessions scheduled. This was made necessary by
an earlier call by local trade unions for a day-long general strike
that would have prevented vehicular traffic on the streets of
Trivandrum, which would have made it almost impossible for delegates
to reach Technopark. The organizers therefore rescheduled the
programme to allow for some tutorials for delegates at Hotel Samudra
itself. In the event, though the strike was called off at the last
minute, the delegates spent the Friday well, some attending David
Kastrup's tutorial, and others setting out for sightseeing and
shopping!

Day Three

Saturday, 7 September began with none of the laziness of a typical
weekend, as the TUG Business Session reviewed the past year's annual
report, discussed some points of budgets and finances, and the
forthcoming elections to various official posts.

After that, the first lecture of the day was by G. Nagarjuna of the
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, who talked on semantic
Web, the GNOWSYS project and online publishing.

The theme of online communication was also a key point in the next
presentation by Srivathsan, Director of the Indian Institute of
Information Technology and Management - Kerala (IITMK), who talked of
using free software in the nationwide education grid that his
institute is now working on.

A Chinese touch followed, with a presentation by the founder and
Chairman of the Chinese TeX Users Group, Hong Feng, who attempted
to marry TeX with Lojban, an artificial, ambiguity-free language
constructed in 1955. Feng pointed out how it is possible to encode
Chinese by using Lojban as the meta-language and by importing the idea
of re-encoding Chinese in variable length strings of human-readable
ASCII codes.

In a brief but interesting presentation just before lunch,
K. Anilkumar of Linuxsense Information Systems, Trivandrum, India,
presented a way of exploiting shell-escape to make TeX read
databases and generate reports.

In the first lecture after lunch, John Plaice of the University of New
South Wales, Australia presented a paper written along with Yannis
Haralambous of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications
de Bretagne, France. They presented tools, based on the Omega
typesetting system and using fonts from devnag, for typesetting
languages using the Devanagiri script (Hindi, Sanskrit,
Marathi). These tools can be adapted to particular environments of
input methods and fonts, and even to other Indic languages, the paper
argued.

Fabrice Popineau of SUPELEC, France, talked of what's new with the 7th
version of TeXLive under Windows. He also told delegates of an
imminent project, funded by the French Ministry of Education, to
tightly integrate XEmacs and TeX to provide an easy-to-use,
out-of-the-box word processing tool.

In the last lecture of TUG 2002, Karel Skoupy discussed the
development of a TeX file server, which will offer cross-network
transparency and resource sharing. He demonstrated the prototype of
the server, and its protocol and integration with kpathsea.

Before the closing ceremony of TUG 2002, delegates were treated to a video
display that showcased the attractions of Big Island, Hawai'i, the venue
of TUG 2003, the Silver Anniversary of TeX. 

At the closing ceremony, Satish Babu thanked all those who had worked
tirelessly to make the conference a success. Dominik Wujastyk summed
up the achievements of TUG 2002, noting, in particular, how potential
disruptions had been managed in a quiet, unobtrusive and peaceful
manner.

As TUG 2002 came to a close, and delegates began exchanging hugs and
goodbyes (or ``Alohas'', which is Hawai'ian for both ``goodye'' and
``hello''), all eyes were trained on the Outrigger Waikola Beach Resort,
Big Island, Hawai'i, where, from July 20 to 24, TeXies will
congregate to celebrate 25 years of TeX.

See you in Hawai'i!  

[Indic-computing-users] Keyboard problem and the ISCII barrier

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

From apl...@bg...

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002 apl...@bg... wrote:

I have been involved in developing technology for Indian Languages, to
name a few:

1. Anti-aliasing Font Technology for Set-Top Box
2. Embedding fonts for Pagers
3. Localisation of MS Windows 95/98 (to localise the standard menu,
pull-down menu, re-bar menu, re-bar buttons, dialog boxes, status bar
text etc of MS Windows 95/98 and this would enable all the applications
developed using the standard controls to be localised. This project is
completed for Tamil)
4. Spellchecker for Tamil
5. plug-ins for MS Office and StarOffice to provide features like
sorting, code conversion etc.
 
Presently working on Enabling MS Windows 95/98 with ISCII and OTF (A
prototype has been already demonstrated)
 
I have also been involved in the standardisation of Indian languages by
state Governments and Central Government.
 
If this line of information is of interest to you and may be of some help
to other members, you may include my name in the mailing list. I offer to
contribute something to the Indic computing.
 
It may not be out of context that I am also a member TDIL R&D working
group of Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Govt of
India.
 
Thanking you, with warm regards.
 
N. Anbarasan
CEO
APPLESOFT
#39, 1st cross, 1st main
Sivanagar, W.C.Road
Bangalore - 560010

[Indic-computing-users] Re: mozilla localization (fwd)

[Rajkumar S <ra...@li...>]

hello,

Reply from Raj Saini.

raj

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 08:05:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Raj Saini <raj...@ya...>
To: Rajkumar S <ra...@li...>
Subject: Re: mozilla localization


Dear Rajkumar,
Thanks for you interest in the Mozilla Localisation Project.

Currently we are working in the Translation of the Mozilla UI in
Hindi. There are four volunteers (including me) working on the
translation.

Mozilla have unicode based support for theIndian script. However the
rendering of the Devanagiri is not proper in the Win32 version of the
Mozilla. I have filled a bug report on bugzilla
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166520). I am not aware
of the support for other Indic scripts as I did not test them.

Currenty, mozilla pages are hosted on
http://www.bttlindia.com/mozilla/ with a partly translated language
pack for Hindi.

I would be glad to contribute in the co-ordinations as I feel, Indian
languages spoken by billions deserve a place in computing.

Regards,

Raj Saini

 Rajkumar S wrote:
hello,

I got your call for volunteers from the netscape.public.mozilla.i18n news
group. I am interested in helping you. Can you please tell me what are you
now currently working on? What is the state of an opentype renderer for
Indic scripts in mozilla?
Last week there was a workshop on Indic computing at Bangalore, and
amongst others one of the major tasks that was identified is to co -
ordinate the various efforts that are happening around the world so as to
make efficient use of the available resources. Please see the site of
Indic computing project at http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/.

regards

raj






---------------------------------
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Re: [Indic-computing-users] [TechWorkingGroup] Technology Map Format

[Arun M <ar...@gn...>]

Hi,

  its not clear what is the role of Working Group members. 
It may be better to put one person in charge of group and made
responsible. Also Members must take a task under his hand and will be
responsible for it. (I dont want to take any now ;) enough work for next
2-3 months, so better remove me. I will help Baiju to prepare a
technical doc on l10n in GNU/Linux and will contribute to Handbook.)

Also need to start an archive of Free Fonts, modmaps etc.



> PLATFORMS
> =========
> 
> * GNU / Linux 

Everything given below works on more than one platforms. So better refer
as Free Software.  

  * Free Software 
    - XFree86 
      (Fill In)

       - Keyboard map
          
         - xkb and modmap

       - XIM/XOM

       - Compose ??
  
    - Glibc    
      
       - Locale
       - Messages (gettext)??

    - Linux (kernel and specific)

    - FreeBSD  (kernel and specific)
      (Fill In)


    - Gnome / Gtk:
      - Version:
      - Rendering / Fonts: Renderer
      - Input Methods: GTK IM Modules and XIM (req for Transliteration only)
      - Printing:
      - Interface Localisation:

      better may be Interface Translation.

      - Unicode Support?: Yes
      - Contact / Link:
      - Active Projects:

   Should we go for OTF alone or BDF/TTF support also to be done ??
   If so we need a std on use of Unicode private area.


    - KDE / Qt:
      (Fill In)
  
    - Applications:
      - Word Processor: OpenOffice 1.0
        Version:
        Rendering / Fonts:
        Input Methods:
        Printing:
        Interface Localisation:
        Text Processing (Searching and Sorting, etc.):
        Dictionaries / Spell-check:
        Contact / Link:
        Active Projects:
  
      - Text Editor:      
        Yudit:
        (Fill In)
        Emacs:
   


      - Web Browser: Mozilla
        (Fill In)
  
      - Mail Client: Mozilla
        (Fill In)    

        (Not req, part of mozilla l10n effort) 

      - Office Suite: OpenOffice 1.0
        (See Above)
  
      - Any more apps... (more than 1 per category is fine)





> 
> * Microsoft Windows
> 
>   - Windows 2000 / XP
>     (Fill In)
> 
>   - Windows 98 / NT
>     (Fill In)
> 
> 
> * Apple MacOS
>   - OS X / Darwin
>     (Fill In)
>   - 0S 9
>     (Fill In)
> * Other
      

>   - etc...
> 
> 
> FONTS
> ======
> 
> * Font Name:
>   Version:
>   Type:
>   Language(s):
>   Quality:
>   Number of Glyphs:
>   License:
>   Availability:
>   Creator(s):
>   Contact / Link:
> 
> * More fonts...
> 
> 
> LIBRARIES / APIS
> =================
> 
> * Library Name:
>   Version:
>   Platform:
>   Language:
>   Other Language Bindings:
>   Provides:
>   Compatible With:
>   Contact / Link: 
> 
> * More...
> 
> MISCELLANEOUS
> ================
> 
> * All kinds of other technologies we dont know where else to put.

Info on Transliteration Schemes, Key board layouts, Sorting rules.
Information on Tools and technologies relating to i18n and l10n.

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Working Groups

[Hema A M. <he...@la...>]

> 
> > * Linguistics Group - Look at various deeper issues that arise out of
> > the Languages Working Group, to identify better and more appropriate
> > translations, encodings, representations etc.
> > Members: Kalika (Kalika - We need more linguists!  Where does one find
> > them?)
> 
> Kalika, to add to Tapan's suggestion, perhaps you could write to the Central
> Language Research Institute at Mysore and find out if they are interested?
> Would they be able to help us with all the Indian languages? This could be
> followed up by myself or one of the organizers meeting them the next time we
> are in Bangalore.
This is the the e-mail address of Dr. Udaya Narain .. o f CIIL .  He is 
the director of CIIL.  He is very enthusiastic but would like to work in
a project mode - he would like projects given to CIIL with funding support
identified.

ud...@ci...

I personally think that the Indic effort does require a political will -
I think WE MUST talk to the Om Vikas' and others and ensure that we
get govt. funding for this.  

-hema

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Working Groups

[Venky H. <ve...@vs...>]

My comments below:

> * Languages Working Group - Organize different linguistic resource
> groups to take a lead in localisation, translation, standards, etc.
> Would also be working very closely on linguistic handbook.
> Members: Karunakar, Nagarjuna, Ravi Kant, KGP, Durgesh Rao, Vijay, Koshy
> (for handbook publishing)

Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil and Hindi groups were represented at the workshop
but we need to cast our net wider and identify who (if at all) is working on
languages like Gujarati, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Kannada, Telugu and other
languages. This needs a concerted effort to reach out to lingusitic groups.
Perhaps Fred, Karunakar and I could work on this? Karunakar, did you prepare
a list in the past with who's working on what language?

> * OpenType Font Development Group - Work towards the development of
> freely available, quality Indic Language Open Type Fonts in all
> languages.
> Members: Karunakar, KGP, Nagarjuna, Arun M, Rajkumar, Dr. Pavanaja

> * Users Working Group - Document the needs of the various User
> Communities.  Present clear specifications, bugs and requirements to the
> rest of the indic-computing community.
> Members: Sunil, Vijay, Ashish, Ravi Kant

If any of this stuff needs editing or rewriting, let me know. After all, I
am a journalist!

> * Linguistics Group - Look at various deeper issues that arise out of
> the Languages Working Group, to identify better and more appropriate
> translations, encodings, representations etc.
> Members: Kalika (Kalika - We need more linguists!  Where does one find
> them?)

Kalika, to add to Tapan's suggestion, perhaps you could write to the Central
Language Research Institute at Mysore and find out if they are interested?
Would they be able to help us with all the Indian languages? This could be
followed up by myself or one of the organizers meeting them the next time we
are in Bangalore.

Venky

[Indic-computing-users] [LangWorkingGroup] Language Handbook Format

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

Karunakar,

Im attaching in plain text a possible format for the language handbook
of the indic-computing project.  

Im working on a draft for the format of the Technology Map that I will
take up amongst the Technology Working Group soon.  Ill circulate that
shortly.

-- Tapan

[Indic-computing-users] [TechWorkingGroup] Technology Map Format

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

Technology Working Group Notice:

Find attached a draft of the kinds of information we should collate for
the technology map.  Here is how I broke it up:

First into PLATFORMS - so a prospective user / developer can go to his
platform right away and see the status of indianisation of libraries and
applications for that platform.  This way he wil know right away whether
or not to use a platform, as a user, or what to work on, as a developer.

For each PLATFORM, we would describe the OS-level support as well as
APPLICATION-level support for various key applications.  Each such
description would include info about FONTS supported, INPUT METHODS, UI
Localisation, PRINTING, etc.  This description should in almost all
cases be info about the current stable release of the application from
the main Working Tree.  

Additionally we can have info about various local and otherwise PROJECTS
that are working on improving either OS-level and APP-level indic
support.

For Linux we will have to do most of this searching and documenting
ourselves I think.  For Windows we should be able to get help from our
friends at MS and other companies to chip in some of their docs.

Next, FONTS.  Pretty self-explanatory

Next, LIBRARIES and APIs.  Again, self-explanatory.

Finally, MISCELLANEOUS.  For all the stuff we couldnt file above.

Anyway, looking forward to feedback on this.  We should finalize the
format and then find ways to populate this information as rigorously and
as usefully as possible.

Ok - Rajkumar, Arun, Karunakar, Keyur, Koshy, etc.?  

- Tapan Parikh
- Technology Working Group
- Indic-Computing Project

[Indic-computing-users] two more groups

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

Two more groups that may be needed

* Outreach Group - to expand the membership of indic-computing, to
invite other people to join and contribute and to avail resources, etc.
Members:  Fred.  [Full Stop]

* Administration Group - to handle logistics like fund-raising for
workshops and projects, managing money and communication, etc.  (Venky
has to fit somewhere ;)
Members:  Venky and whomever else would like to join

-- Tapan

[Indic-computing-users] Working Groups

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

I propose we form different Working Groups to take forward
indic-computing effort.  I think each of the working groups should be
led by one member of us to try to find other people to join and to
direct the effort.  Here are some possible Working Groups I see and who
could be involved in them.  Sorry if I left anyone out, but feel free to
join in.  I wasnt taking notes at the workshop ;).

Working Groups
==============

* Technical Projects Working Group - Organize the various technology
projects, including directing and bringing together the various software
localisation groups, particularly those disparate ones working on
GNU/Linux.  Also would be working closely on technology map.
Members: Arun M, Karunakar, Keyur Schroff, Koshy, Pankaj, Rajkumar,
Tapan 

* Languages Working Group - Organize different linguistic resource
groups to take a lead in localisation, translation, standards, etc. 
Would also be working very closely on linguistic handbook.
Members: Karunakar, Nagarjuna, Ravi Kant, KGP, Durgesh Rao, Vijay, Koshy
(for handbook publishing)

* OpenType Font Development Group - Work towards the development of
freely available, quality Indic Language Open Type Fonts in all
languages.
Members: Karunakar, KGP, Nagarjuna, Arun M, Rajkumar, Dr. Pavanaja

* Users Working Group - Document the needs of the various User
Communities.  Present clear specifications, bugs and requirements to the
rest of the indic-computing community.
Members: Sunil, Vijay, Ashish, Ravi Kant

* Linguistics Group - Look at various deeper issues that arise out of
the Languages Working Group, to identify better and more appropriate
translations, encodings, representations etc.
Members: Kalika (Kalika - We need more linguists!  Where does one find
them?)

Anyway that is a start.  I am trying to arrange a server where we can
run mailman ourselves so eventually we can form sub-mailing lists for
each of these Working Groups.  

-- Tapan

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Localization in Mumbai

[Rajkumar S <ra...@li...>]

Guntupalli Karunakar said:

> Long time back I had looked into this, & got mozilla in Hindi using
> Shusha fonts. The work didnt go much further as there was the usual
> debate of using font based encoding or unicode. Back then mozilla has
> limited unicode support & Java didnt have Hindi support. I had written
> few docs on this, will dig out from by backup cds.

We need to work on indic rendering also, in the case of mozilla the
translation is less important than actual rendering of Indic scripts. I
have written to the team in Sun who is working in mozilla localisation
about the work they are doing.
From reading the code, it seems that the are going the glyph encoding way
rather than the Opentype way. They are also using pango. but first let us
hear from them.
raj

Re: [Indic-computing-users] Localization in Mumbai

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002 11:04:01 +0530
"Nagarjuna G." <nag...@hb...> wrote:

> There are at least five teams in Mumbai who are serious in solving
> the localization problem. 1. Karunakar, Prakash (Netcore)
> 		      2. Keyur and others at NCST
> 		      3. Jitender Shaw and his student team (VJTI)
> 		      4. Tapan and Venky at Media Labs
> 		      5. Me at HBCSE,TIFR.
> If there are others please let me know.  I propose that we work in
> close coordination so that duplication of work could be avoided
> saving so many man hours.  Both Jitender Shaw and me are willing to
> provide students to do the laborious technical jobs.  If Keyur other
> experts in the field conduct a few workshops so that the work force
> could get the skills imparted it would be really good.
>
 What we could have is Resource groups ( ala TDIL ), A group will
comprise of all people living in a geographical proximity, interested
in localisation work together, also taking support from local
organisations. This groups will have all activities ongoing made known
to themselves & other groups outside. Leaders of the groups will be in
Indic-computing group working at a national level. We had some of them
from this workshop. 

 Few areas/cities where I know of activities going on are
Ahmedabad - Gujarati,
Bangalore - Kannada, Telugu,
Bhopal - Hindi, 
Chennai - Tamil, 
Delhi - Hindi, Gurmukhi, 
Hyderabad - Telugu, 
Jabalpur - Hindi, 
Kanpur - Hindi, 
Kolkata - Bengali, 
Mumbai - Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, 
Pune - Marathi, 
Trivandrum - Malayalam.  

I will put up my thoughts on this more properly in another mail.

 We will probably have a session within next month & have all
activities based in mumbai & around known.
 This could be done for other places too. eg All those present at
workshop can take it up in their cities, organise a meeting or
workshop , bringing all people who are working in localisation area
together, 
 
> BTW, today evening at 5pm Karunakar and me would be joining the
> Jitender Shaw's camp at Powai to begin the work.  I managed to know
> the technical issues to some extent from Arun at Trivandrum, with
> whome I sat for few nights during TUG 2002. I am preparing my self
> to solve the localization problem particularly on the browser side
> (HBCSE's own interest, we have a lot of content to deliver).  Keyur
> I heard is already working with Mozilla (I have seen his name
> mentioned on the Mozilla website.)  Any technical inputs in this
> regard would be welcome.
> 
 Long time back I had looked into this, & got mozilla in Hindi using
Shusha fonts. The work didnt go much further as there was the usual
debate of using font based encoding or unicode. Back then mozilla has
limited unicode support & Java didnt have Hindi support. I had written
few docs on this, will dig out from by backup cds.

 Actually I had done lot of R&D work on  i18n/l10n issues, for
IndLinux while at freeos.com , when i18n stuff had just started taking
shape in Linux. Most of the info is in bits n pieces, in old mails,
mail archives, docs etc. While collecting this info didnt try much to
put the info in order, so now reached a point where I am literraly
buried under this heap of info & I cant get out under it on my own &
need others help. To some extent started this work by working with
others like malayalamlinux, telugu team & marathi team. Similarly
passing on info to any interested volunteer depending on what he wants
to do. This has already started the Gnome Hindi translations , Telugu
translations & font development efforts. I request everyone to pose
any questions they have regd localisation, this would help (motivate)
me to dig out the info & this time we make sure that its well
documented.
 
 I think the next step in coming months would be to get all the people
who have/are doing work together.
I think Linux Bangalore2002 would be a good venue for it. Last year
too 'Localisation sessions' were termed as key achievements ( icing on
the cake ). Showcasing localisation work there would be best, as there
would be good concentration of hackers & media to cover the event. We
just need to be there.

I will continue in another thread ( will become late for 5pm meeting
).

Regards,
Karunakar

[Indic-computing-users] Quiet out there...

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

Not many postings on this list... Getting lonely. Please post. FN

[Indic-computing-users] Localization in Mumbai

[Nagarjuna G. <nag...@hb...>]

There are at least five teams in Mumbai who are serious in solving the
localization problem. 1. Karunakar, Prakash (Netcore)
		      2. Keyur and others at NCST
		      3. Jitender Shaw and his student team (VJTI)
		      4. Tapan and Venky at Media Labs
		      5. Me at HBCSE,TIFR.
If there are others please let me know.  I propose that we work in
close coordination so that duplication of work could be avoided saving
so many man hours.  Both Jitender Shaw and me are willing to provide
students to do the laborious technical jobs.  If Keyur other experts
in the field conduct a few workshops so that the work force could get
the skills imparted it would be really good.

BTW, today evening at 5pm Karunakar and me would be joining the
Jitender Shaw's camp at Powai to begin the work.  I managed to know
the technical issues to some extent from Arun at Trivandrum, with
whome I sat for few nights during TUG 2002. I am preparing my self to
solve the localization problem particularly on the browser side
(HBCSE's own interest, we have a lot of content to deliver).  Keyur I
heard is already working with Mozilla (I have seen his name mentioned
on the Mozilla website.)  Any technical inputs in this regard would be
welcome.

Nagarjuna

[Indic-computing-users] Re: pure consonant vs full consonant

[Krishnamurthy N. <kn...@ya...>]

Note: forwarded message attached.


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

[Indic-computing-users] IndicComputingNotes: Links, comments from overseas....

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
20Sep2002##########IndicComputing Bytes#########################Issue02
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

PEOPLE INTERESTED IN THE FIELD: This is an impressive list of people
working/interested in the Indic Computing field. It is based on those who
attended (or could not make it) for the Sept 15-16 Indic-Computing Workshop
at Bangalore.

If you would like to get in touch with any of them, you can locate their
contact details via Tapan S. Parikh <ta...@ya...>:

Dr. U B Pavanaja (Kannada Ganaka Parishad, Bangalore), Joseph Koshy
(Hewlett-Packard, Bangalore), Brij Sethi (H-P Bangalore), Sunil Abraham
(Mahiti, Bangalore) RVS Sastry (IISc, Bangalore) C.V. Srinatha Sastry (KGP,
Bangalore), Kalika Bali (Picopeta Simputers, Bangalore), N Anitha (IISc,
Bangalore), Abraham K Mathen (H-P, Bangalore), K Nagarajan (H-P, Bangalore),
Sayamindu Dasgupta (ILUG-Calcutta).

Also on the list are Manoj R Annadurai and Aboo Thanish (Chennai Kavigal),
Dr. Hema Murthy (IIT-Madras Chennai), Rajkumar S (Free Software Foundation,
Kerala), Arun M (FSF, Tiruvananthapuram), Prof Pat Hall (Open University,
London), G Karunakar (Netcore, Mumbai), Tapan Parikh (Mumbai), Venkatesh
Hariharan (IndLinux, Mumbai), G. Nagarjuna (TIFR/FSF-Mumbai), Prakash Advani
(Netcore, Mumbai), Raveesh Gupta (Microsoft, New Delhi), Ravi Kant and
Pankaj Kaushal (Sarai, New Delhi), Mita Radhakrishnan and Tapas Desrousseaux
(Aurovillle Language Lab, Pondicherry), Ashish Kotamkar (Mithi, Pune), Ravi
Pande (font designer, Pune), Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya (Ahmedabad), Ms Neepa
Shah (Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Ahmedabad), Dr Samir Kelekar (KonkaniNet,
Goa/Bangalore), Susan Uskudarli (Bangalore), Abhas Abhinav and Vikram Singh
(DeepRoot Linux, Bangalore), KSR Anjaneyulu (H-P, Bangalore), Durgesh Rao
(NCST, Mumbai), Narasimha Murthy, TB Dinesh, CS Ramalingam, Naveen and
Suzanne (H-P, Bangalore).

Other members who could not participate, but are interested in/working on
the subject are:

Bala Pillai (Tamil Net, Australia), Manoranjan Kumar Singh (NCST,
Bangalore), CV Radhakrishnan (River Valley Technologies, Kerala), Dr Srinath
Srinivasa (IIIT-B, Bangalore), Dr Vinay L Deshpande (Ncore Technologies,
Blore), Prof Swami Manohar (Picopeta Simputers, Blore), Dr Sri Ganesh and
Prof A G Ramakrishnan (H-P, Banglore), Abhijit Das (IISc-Bangalore),
Swayandipta Pal Chaudhuri (Perl Mongers, Calcutta), Vinay Chhajalani
(Webduniya, Indore) Suresh Babu (INAPP Thiruvananthapuram), Baiju M
(FSF-Tvm), Keyur Shroff (NCST Mumbai), Srinath Shanbag (NCST Mumbai), Dr.
Pushpak Bhattacharya (IIT-Bombay, Mumbai), Osama Manzar (4Cplus.net New
Delhi), Aman Grewal (CHiPS Raipur), M K Saravanan (Centre for Singapore
Internet Research), Frank Pohlmann, Mahesh Pai, Edward Cherlin, Owen Taylor,
Eric Mader, Gaspar Sinai (Yudit), Deborah W Anderson (Script Encoding
Initiative), Free Standards Group, Asmus Freytag and Joseph Becker and
Kenneth Whistler (Unicode), Prof Ken Kenniston (MIT), Supreet (Sarai).
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

INDIAN TONGUES, NOT AVAILABLE: Dulce Felix <du...@cy...> of
http://www.cityradio.nu offers submissions to Japanese search engines,
Chinese search engines, German search engines, Hispanic search engines etc.

Felix says: "Please note that at this point we do not provide website
promotion services in any of the Indian languages." Chinese, Korean and
Japanese are among the Asian languages offered.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

COMMENT FROM KOLKATA: In a discussion arising on the Linux-Bangalore
non-tech list <lin...@ya...> P.K.Sharma
<pks...@ca...> of Calcutta had a point to make.

Responding to a report on the recent Bangalore Indic-Computing meet, he
argued: "I find this info quite useful. In Calcutta we are working on
bringing Bengali into Linux. A member claims success in it too!..."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LINKS TO GETTEXT AND EMACS INTERNATIONALIZATION: Richard Stallman
<rm...@gn...> founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), responded to a
query about who were the right persons to contact re. the
internationalization of GNU/Linux (specially to Indian languages). He wrote:
"The maintainer of GNU Gettext is ha...@il.... ha...@et... works on
internationalization of Emacs." Maybe we should be contacting such quarters
more regularly, to place our concerns in mind.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NOTES FROM AN AMAZING LINGUIST IN THE US: Edward Cherlin
<ed...@we...> creates international, multilingual Web sites, and
is active in Internationalization standards and implementation. He's based
in Cupertino CA 95014

He offered some interesting comments: 

ON FONTS AND TOOLS: Responding to Dr Pavanaja's point that Pfaedit can
create only glyph sets and cannot make an Opentype font with embedded tables
for glyph substitution, glyph positioning, distance, etc, Cherlin argues:
"Right. However, it is open source, so adding the ability to write Opentype
tables should be straightforward. See also GOTE (GNU OpenType Editor,
currently described as "rather alpha"."

"There are other commercial font editors. Fontlab 4.0 from Tiro Typeworks
can create Opentype fonts, and in a future version will be able to handle
non-BMP character codes," he says.

"Graphite's (a good toolkit for rendering) developers are trying to revive
it, perhaps in combination with Pango, which has joined Li18nux, which has
joined the Free Standards Group."

WITH AN OPENTYPE FONT AND RENDERING MECHANISM, WRITING A KEYBOARD DRIVER IS
QUITE EASY: Says Dr Cherlin: "Right. For Unix, it is a matter of looking up
the correct codes to enter into a text file. Mac is more work, and Windows
requires membership in MSDN to handle keyboard layouts completely.
Tavultesoft Keyman is a free program to create keyboard layouts, but it
operates at a different level from Microsoft's own keyboards."

SORTING TEXT: "Text to be sorted must go through several steps before
strings can be compared. UTR#10 discusses preprocessing, normalization,
array formation, and forming sort keys. There is also consideration of
'override mechanisms (tailoring) for creating language-specific
orderings.'," says Cherlin.

Dr Cherlin has written a market research study, "Non-Latin Font Technology
and Markets" (1990), and in 1994, wrote and published a study, "The
Worldwide Impact of the Unicode Character Set Standard". He is in the
process of taking over maintenance of the Unicode HOWTO for Linux from Bruno
Haible.

Some of the languages he has learnt in life include Hebrew at the synagogue
starting at age eight, a year of Latin in eighth grade, French and Russian
in High School, Swahili and a little Chinese in an after-school club, more
French and Russian in college, Korean in the Peace Corps, Japanese in Japan,
a little Pali and Sanskrit in his Buddhist training, Chinese at Durham
University in the UK, APL from my father, Tolkien's Dwarvish and Elvish,
Classical Greek (Euclid), Yiddish, Spanish, German, and a little Italian and
Portuguese on his own, the invented language Loglan on his won, the invented
language Lojban with the Logical Language Group, Various Slavic languages
plus Georgian and Armenian with the Slavyanka Russian Chorus, Tabla bols in
both Devanagari and Arabic script. Amazing! He is currently helping Tex
Texin on his Compelling Unicode Demo with Yiddish, Cherokee, Azeri, and
Burmese examples.

Says he: "If I had time, I would look at Farsi next, particularly the
astronomical and mathematical works of Omar Khayyam, and of course his
poetry, too. But for now I am sticking with writing systems rather than
languages. I am creating a Unicode APL font, and prodding people to do the
necessary Indic and South Asian Opentype fonts and rendering so that
everyone else can get on with the real work." He's available for consulting
contracts, or even a full-time job.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MORE FROM CHERLIN: This is the factual position, as he desscribes it --
"India has 18 official languages written in 10 different alphabets:
Devanagari (used for Hindi, Marathi, and others), Bengali, Gurmukhi
(Punjabi), Gujarati, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Latin
(English). In addition, more than 800 other languages spoken in India do not
have official status. Mandrake Linux, one popular distribution, includes
keyboards and fonts for Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Tamil,
five of the nine Indic writing systems. Unfortunately, many applications do
not accept these characters, and those that accept them may not handle them
correctly."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WHAT'S THE REAL DIFFICULTY?: Edward Cherlin of Web for Humans, an
international Web development company based in Cupertino, California, says,
"The problems of rendering each standard Indic script are reasonably well
understood, and will be solved soon in Pango. The real difficulty is with
languages that have never been written, or are written in non-standard
variants of the official scripts. The only organization I know of that has
been working seriously on this problem is Summer Institute of Linguistics
(SIL), and their work is stalled for lack of funds." Cherlin is active in
Unicode, L18nux, Pango, Free Standards Group, and other organizations
working on Indic and other unsupported writing systems, especially on the
problem of getting all of the interested parties into contact with each
other.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NOTE, SOMETHING ABOUT PANGO AND LI18NUX: Owen Taylor <ot...@re...> is
the founder of the Pango project. Li18nux is working on standards for
keyboard input, among other things, in conjunction with the Linux Standard
Base of the Free Standards Group. They have focused first on Input Methods
for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but when Pango's Indic support is
complete they will extend their standard to include it.

At the toolkit level, Gtk and Qt are the most used toolkits. This helps. Gtk
already has a good framework through Pango project, and basic level support
for Indian languages. Qt also now has Unicode level support for all
languages, but rendering is not yet ready. However, Pango is independent of
Gtk, and can be used with Qt or any other software.

GNU, Li18nux and Pango are focusing on Opentype, which is the only 
font format that provides the glyph mapping tables needed to support 
Indic conjuncts. GOTE, the GNU OpenType Editor, will be the essential 
tool for this effort when it is completed.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WinXP AND APPLE: Cherlin explains other issues too. As he puts it: "Some
argue today that only Microsoft's WinXP has any kind of Indian language
support worth speaking about, even though Apple has provided Indian language
kits for many years.

"There is confusion about Unicode support for Indic writing systems, since
Unicode does not provide character codes for conjunct glyphs. Many in India
still think that this is a design flaw in Unicode, whereas the Unicode
designers argue that it is a necessary design decision so that we can escape
from the current broken Indic rendering techniques.

"The set of conjuncts is needed is not determined solely by the writing
system and language. It is font-specific, and can therefore only be
supported by font glyphs, not character encoding.  Unfortunately, PostScript
and TrueType fonts do not support the correct mapping tables, and the
problem can only be solved with Opentype fonts.

"In contrast, rendering Indic scripts using PostScript or TrueType fonts
requires encoding the conjuncts directly in the text stream, rather than the
letters composing them, and requires non-standard software to translate
between the sequence of letters from the keyboard and the sequence of
conjunct characters in a non-standard font. The result is text that cannot
be sorted and searched properly, where spelling and grammar checkers cannot
operate. It is hard on users to have to wait so long for proper support of
Indic scripts through Unicode, but the results are guaranteed to justify the
delay."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TEX USERS' CONTRIBUTION: Indian TeX Users Group have a project now to fund
font designers in all the Indian languages who are ready to write fonts and
donate under GPL to TUGIndia. They've thus secured 'Keli' a Malayalam font
family in various weights and shapes written by Hashim and released under
GPL. "We do hope to get more fonts in other languages to fill up the gaps.
We hope to use the savings generated with TUG2002 (to be held in India in
September 2002) exclusively for this purpose," says Radhakrishnan in
Thiruvananthapuram. Maybe these friends should get in touch with Pango and
Li18nux.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

UNITYPE GLOBAL OFFICE, AN ADD-ON TO MS-OFFICE: Cherlin suggests, for those
who can afford it, Unitype Global Office, an add-on to Microsoft Office
which supports Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali,
Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Maldivian, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Pashto, Dari,
and many other languages. See http://www.unitype.com/globaloffice.htm.
Although it uses non-Unicode encoded fonts and a non-standard rendering
engine, Global Office and Microsoft Office together are capable of writing
Unicode files that can be viewed correctly with Opentype Indic fonts when
they become available.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HARDLY ANY GPL-ed: SIL's Fonts in Cyberspace pages at
http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/ and Alan Wood's Unicode Resources at
http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fontsbyrange.html both list fonts for
every major writing system, but hardly any are GPL-ed. This is about to
change, according to Cherlin. "Several projects and numerous individuals are
working on Free Unicode fonts, now that commercial Opentype font editors
such as Tiro Typeworks Fontlab 4.0 are available. Finishing the GNU OpenType
Editor (GOTE) will speed things up much more."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOME INTERESTING LINKS: 
Pango http://www.pango.org
Graphite http://www.sil.org/computing/graphite/
Li18nux http://www.li18nux.org
Free Standards Group http://www.freestandards.org/
Mandrake http://www.mandrake.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Compiled in public interest from material on the Net by:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India 832.409490 / 409783
BYTESFORALL www.bytesforall.org  * GNU-LINUX http://linuxinindia.pitas.com
Email fr...@by... * Mobile +9822 122436 (Goa) * Saligao Goa India
Writing with a difference... on what makes *the* difference

[Indic-computing-users] Correction: knr

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

Small correction:

K Nagarajan who talked about his transliteration framework at the
workshop requests that you use his yahoo mail kn...@ya... for all
indic-computing related mail.  Yesterdays participant list incorrectly
included his work email.

-- Tapan

[Indic-computing-users] List of Participants for Indic-computing workshop 15-16 Sep 2002

[Vijay P. S. A. <vi...@sr...>]

Hi all,

It was good to meet you all at Bangalore. We hope to be in touch with 
each other. We hope that the groups formed would takeup from here and 
would communicate with other members who may like to join in various 
projects discussed.

Attached is list of all participants present in the Indic-computing 
workshop 15-16 Sep 2002 at Bangalore. This list also have contact 
information of the people.

Also included is list of people whom we had been in touch with and could 
not make it to the workshop but would now like to join in.

best

vijay

[Indic-computing-users] Hello Indic-Computers!

[Tapan S. P. <ta...@ya...>]

Hi Everyone from the Workshop and other Indic-Computers,

And you thought you had heard the last of me.  Unfortunately, not.  ;)

I have just subscribed everyone I remembered from the workshop to the
indic-computing-users and -announce lists. There are also -devel and
-standards lists, and if you are interested, you may join them also.  

I did not have the official list so I may have missed some people.  (For
example, Dr. Ramalingam from TeNeT I know I missed b/c I didnt have his
email here with me.  Dr Murthy from KGP seems to be missing from my list
too.)  But since Fred has happily started posting away onto this -users
list, I thought I had better get everyone I knew on board so we could
avail of his varied wisdoms and knowledge points.

We (meaning myself, Vijay, Ashish and Venky) are busy with several tasks
as a result of the workshop.  Here are the things we hope to get down
and back to you soon, in the following order:

- list of workshop participants and email addresses (Vijay)

- document workshop proceedings, presentations and results, and
circulation of same (Vijay, Ashish, Koshy)

We are also discussing the best way to form and support different kinds
of Working Groups to tackle the various administrative, infrastructural
and technical tasks ahead of us.  Some of that discussion will probably
happen back-channel, but it would be nice if we could also start up some
discussion about how to handle that on this list as well.

Anyway, enough from me for the time being.  I hope you all enjoyed the
workshop, I certainly did.  Many thanks to all of you for attending and
sharing!

-- Tapan