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

[Indic-computing-users] Total Tamil computer is now available

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

Thanks to Animesh Nerurkar in Goa for sending this across to me. We hope
people like Animesh will join the indic-computing mailing list on
Sourceforge.net too. FN

---------- Forwarded message ----------

--- "V_VenkataRamanan" <ve...@ta...> wrote:

Hello all,

Here  is a  Press Release, I wrote on request from people here in
Toronto,  on the  forthcoming  Mandrake 9.0  with Tamil  enabled.
Please  feel free  to forward to people who may be intrested. You
may  be able to download a formatted version of this in tamil and
english from the following URLs.

Tamil: http://www.tamillinux.org/articles/mandrake_tam.pdf

English: http://www.tamillinux.org/articles/mandrake_eng.pdf

Feel     free    to    download    the    screen    shots    from
http://www.tamillinux.org/kde/imsges/Thumbnails.html

regards,

Venkat

Toronto.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Total Tamil computer is now available

People  throughout the  world are using computers and Internet in
their  own languages.  However, Indian users are compelled to use
them  in  English. This is  strange and is inexplicable to anyone
from  outside  India. It is  undeniable that Indian engineers and
scientists  are a  dominant force in the IT world, but it is also
true  that  they are grossly negligent  of the needs of their own
masses. This has pushed India to the top of the list of countries
suffering from the Digital Divide.

No  more!  The solution  is on  the horizon.  With the release of
Mandrake  Linux  9.0, an  average  user  (without much  technical
knowledge)  should be able to operate a computer and use Internet
-   all   in  Tamil.   For  the   first  time,  the  unfathomable
prerequisite  of English  knowledge for  operating computers  has
been eliminated, at least for those who know Tamil.

What is possible?

Mandrake  is a package distributor of Linux and other open source
software.  While  installing Mandrake  Linux  9.0,  it gives  the
choice  of language  for Graphical User Interface (GUI). All that
is needed is to opt for Tamil here.  The installation, in most of
the   cases,  will  be  smooth  with  all  hardware  and  network
connections auto configured.

At  the  end of the installation,  when you reboot and login, you
will  be presented  with a Tamil GUI (with the exception of a few
yet  to  be Tamil-enabled programs).  It is all yours to explore.
Almost  all operations for an average home user or a small office
are  now  possible with  total Tamil interface.  You can do these
tasks with Tamil GUI;

1.    Configure your computer and connect to Internet

2.  Create  and  edit  files  in Tamil  and  English  (and  other
languages!!)

3.    Manage your files and disks

4.    Send email, browse Internet and chat.

5.    Listen audio files and watch videos

6.  Do all  small office  works (Word  Processing, Spread  Sheet,
Presentation Graphics=85)

7.    Maintain your personal/small office accounts

8.    Schedule your tasks, Add and manage users.

9.    Manage your desktop appearance,

You can do much more than these.  For example, you may be able to
configure  and  run a  FTP site  with Tamil GUI.  There are a few
areas  where work  is currently  under progress  these include  a
graphics editor, a CAD drawing program, etc.

Why in Tamil?

Why  not?  Almost  all  developed  countries  use  computers  and
Internet  entirely  in their local  languages. In India, there is
an  unfortunate  mindset  to equate  (English)  language  ability
to   technical  achievement  or  intellectual  superiority.  Like
every  other device,  computers are  the tools  invented by  men.
It is natural  to  sharpen the  tool to  make it  suitable to the
human  beings  as  against  adopting himself  to  the  tools.  To
make  the  fruits of  technology available to  the common man, it
should be made simple enough for the common man to understand.

English  language  ability as  a precondition  to computer use is
ridiculous  in  the  context  of  majority  non-English  speaking
population.  Unless we  shape  the  tool to  our  needs, we  will
always  be  dependent  on  other  toolmakers  for  our  survival.

Availability   of   Tamil   computers   will   enable   localized
applications  (such as  Sales Tax  forms or  Voter's List)  to be
developed rapidly.

This  will also  take the  local business  to the  new realms  of
commerce.  There will  be a  strong motivation  for the  students
to   develop  applications   for   their  commonplace   problems.
Modern   appliances  such   as  cellular  phones  and televisions
are   being  designed  with  embedded  computers  =96  it  will  be
impossible  to  penetrate  the  local  market  without  a  native
interface.

If  we  do not  do it  now, we  will be  losing on all subsequent
technologies.

What is Linux?

Linux  is an  Operating System (very much similar to the familiar
Microsoft  98,  2000 or  XP). An  operating system interprets the
user  commands  for the microprocessor  in the computer. Linux is
an outcome of efforts of millions of volunteers around the world.
Currently  popular  commercial OS  like Windows  XP do not reveal
source codes.

This  prevents knowledgeable  users  from  efficiently using  the
programs.  While  every other product  you buy lets you to modify
it  to  your need (you  do not need  to seek permission from your
realtor  to repaint  your bedroom or attach an additional jar for
your  mixer),  software  companies have  manipulated  patent  and
copyright  laws  to forbid  users from  adding or modifying their
programs.  Some  intelligent  and  conscious  programmers  viewed
this  as anti-social  and  initiated the  Free Software  Movement
(Free as in `speech' and not as in `lunch').

Thousands  of programmers joined this movement that culminated as
the  Linux  Operating  System  and other  Open  Source  software.
Product  released by  these  volunteers are  cleverly labeled  as
`copyleft'  (to poke pun on `copyright') =96 which lets the user to
peek  into the  source code,  modify them  and redistribute  them
without any strings attached.  The only obligation is to make all
modifications available as copyleft again.

As this pool of programs grew excellent products started emerging
out  in  the late nineties, weeding  out the poor ones by natural
selection.   This  has  now  emerged  as  a  true  and  potential
alternative  to  commercial products.  As  the  source codes  are
freely  available they  are tested  and driven  to the  limits of
their vulnerabilities and all security holes are blocked.

Linux is now estimated as the only operating system that grows in
the market share.

What is Mandrake-Linux?

There  are  several companies that  collect all the free programs
developed  by  the users, test  them for their integrity, package
them  and  distribute them at  a moderate cost. While selling the
free  programs seem  an irony,  many companies  have successfully
thrived  and are continuing to grow despite the overall downtrend
in IT.

Mandrake  is  one of  these companies that  distribute Linux in a
box.  It aims  at taking  Linux  to the  non-technical users  and
towards  that  they have  created some excellent installation and
administration  tools  (which  are again  available  freely  with
source  open). Always  willing  to experiment,  the engineers  at
Mandrake  have worked  closely with  volunteers developing  Tamil
programs  for  Linux and  have now  announced that their upcoming
version 9.0 will enable users to configure their computers with a
Tamil  GUI.

You  may  be able  to buy  Mandrake Linux  in the local bookstore
or  electronic  shop  or  through their  web  store.  Like  every
other   Linux   distributors,  Mandrake  also  makes  the  entire
product  freely  downloadable (it  comes to about  2 GB). But, by
buying  these  Open  Source  products, you  contribute  to  those
volunteers  who  devote their  time and  effort for this laudable
cause.

Unlike  commercial OS,  which  requires buying  a  lot of  extras
(say   an   Office  Suite,  a   Photo  editing  tool,  a  drawing
utility,  etc.), most of the Linux distributions come packed with
hundreds  of  programs and an average  user should be able to get
almost everything he needs right after the installation.

How Tamil GUI is enabled?

The  Linux  volunteer base encompasses  the entire globe. As such
they  have  a common  need to  make these programs inter-operable
with   many  languages.  Their  intelligent  design  of  the  GUI
separates  commands that  are passed to the core of the OS (known
as  the kernel)  from  the interface  icons  and command  prompts
presented  to the  users. This  enables easy  translation of  the
interface  without knowing  the  finer details  of the  programs.
Volunteers working on these projects typically translate commands
into  their own  language. With some minor compilation it is then
firmly integrated with the program.

There  are some  additional tools  necessary such  as a  keyboard
driver,  the native  language  editor,  etc. Several  programmers
have  written  such  tools  for  Tamil.  An  incomplete  list  of
volunteers  include (not  in  any particular  order) Sivaraj,  T.
Vaseeharan, Dinesh Nadarajah, Sivakumar, Gomathi, Venkataramanan,
Nagu  Chinnaswamy,  Prabu Anand, M.K.  Saravanan. This list is by
no  means  exhaustive.  Like  a  typical  Linux  volunteer  cross
section,   Tamil   Linux  programmers   come  from  Canada,  USA,
Singapore, Japan, India and Malaysia, largely interacting through
the web and Internet discussion groups.

It should also be mentioned that these works were possible due to
several   pioneering   efforts   on   Tamil   computing   by   K.
Kalyanasundram,  Manivannan, Muthu  Nedumaran, Suvadi  Ilango and
others.  There  was  also  support  and  encouragement  from  the
International  Federation  of  Information  Technology  in  Tamil
(INFITT) and some industrial partners.

What are the opportunities?

Endless  =96 can  be the only word that can quantify the floodgates
of  opportunities  open  by  this.  Linux has  proven  to  be  an
excellent  and  reliable OS  for  all  applications =96  from  tiny
laptops  to  supercomputers. In a  country like India, due to the
digital  divide, not  even 30%  of  the population  has used  the
computers.   Further   penetration  will   be  only  possible  if
computers are easier to use.

With Tamil enabled computers there will be enormous opportunities
for  the  vendors to design  and build computers for local needs.
As already indicated, this will spur the growth of software tools
for  common  applications  such  as sales  tax  reporting.  Other
Indian languages will soon follow the advances made in Tamil.  As
we  master the art of enabling local language interfaces, we will
be ready to assimilate the new technologies as they emerge.

As Linux OS runs equally well on mean machines, it is possible to
design  and implements low-cost computer laboratories for schools
in  our  community.  Another  potential  area  is  computers  for
government  offices.  Open source  software has been found robust
and   secure  and  there  are  no  hidden  vulnerabilities.  Many
developed  countries  have started adopting open source solutions
for e-governance.

It  is  a great coincidence  that the first out-of-the box Indian
language computer is being released during the 5th Tamil Internet
Conference  to be held in San Francisco, during 27-29th September
2002.  Many  interesting  discussions are  expected  during  this
conference.

Dr. V. Venkataramanan

http://www.tamillinux.org

Some Useful Websites

=B7 The Free Software Foundation (http://www.gnu.org)

=B7 To know more about Linux (http://www.linux.org)

=B7 Tamil Linux developments (http://www.tamillinux.org)

=B7 Tamil Linux discussions (http://groups.yahoo.com/tamilinix)

=B7 Mandrakesoft  (http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/)

=B7 The International Federation of Information Technology in Tamil
(http://www.infitt.org)

=B7   The   fifth  International   Tamil  Internet  Conference  and
Exhibition       at      Foster      City,      California
( http://www.infitt.org/ti2002)

--- end of the press release ----

warm regards
banduji

--=20
:
####[ Linux One Stanza Tip (LOST) ]###########################

Sub : Re-initialise /etc/inittab                     LOST #043

To re-initialise changes made to /etc/inittab without the need
to reboot, do: '#init q'
Init is the last step of the kernel boot sequence. "q" option
re-examines and re-initialises /etc/inittab.

####<bi...@nd...>###################################
:

[Indic-computing-users] Re: Promoting First Free 100% Tamil OS (Linux)

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

Bala, We had a meeting in Bangalore and are keen to take forward the
localisation, with a number of initiatives going ahead on GNU/Linux
too. We need your help. RMS could you give us some more useful
pointers? It appears that we don't have sufficient links with those
working on GNU/Linux i18n outside of India. Who are the useful people to
get in touch with? FN
PS: The note below pertains to the recent Mandrake breakthrough with Tamil

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Bala Pillai wrote:


> Anpulla Singapore Anbu,
> 
> Mikka nandri for such rapid translation work on this monumental success by
> Singapore-based Prabu on the 100% Tamil Computer OS. With your deed, you add
> to our collective online collaboration successes and help extinguish the
> unprofessional voices of despair, excuses and hopelessness that many like to
> echo ad nauseaum.
> 
> Can I suggest a little incremental effort-great gain initiative?
> 
> I reminded Harish Pillay, the President of Singapore Linux User Groups to
> prominently feature this at the Linux conference next month in Singapore -
> see http://www.lugs.org.sg . And to rope in the Singapore Tamil press for
> this newsworthy release. And aim the publicity to get lots more Tamil youth
> in Singapore to provide mind resources for continued Tamil Linux/Tamildom
> Everyware work. Harish had already asked the organising committee to do so.
> 
> Now chances are the Organising Committee is pressed for time, and is nowhere
> as action-passionate (understandably so), priority-wise about Tamil Linux as
> Prabu, you and me are. Thus:-
> 
> (a) phone Prabu and Harish and the three of you meet up
> 
> (b) let Tamil Murasu Kunalan know 100% Tamil Linux OS (mention that I asked
> you to contact him)
> 
> (c) work out with Harish or his nominee, how best it can be featured at the
> Linux Conference - perhaps he can point some Tamil computing students nodal
> relationships at NUS/Nantech to assist you
> 
> (d) online assist Chennai Maharajan as he comes to grips with how
> significant this is and how big of a step it is in our direction towards
> "Tamildom Everyware".
> 
> (e) load up your document onto the Files Section of Erumbugal and make every
> Tamil group on and off the Net aware of it. While mentioning that it will be
> one of the highlights at the Singapore Linux conference (offer this added
> publicity for the conference as a carrot to get the organisers to agree),
> send out emails and get someone in the locality to phone follow-up with
> press folks. In particular Tamil press bridges like Chennai Dr Bose,
> Dinakaran Vanangamudi, Manorama Press etc Sivalingam, Hindu Biz IT Murali,
> Vikatan Vaasan, Colombo Jeyatheepan, Toronto Giritharan (I have more
> relationships -- mention my name and you will have greater response cos I
> have earned my track record). Perhaps you can find someone in Erumbugal or
> prospect one to be our PR point man/woman in Chennai.
> 
> Do above, keep Erumbugal posted and I will suggest more connections,
> processes and steps. And while doing this, you will be building valuable
> relationships for your and Tamil's future as well as learning by doing the
> power and foibles of strategic online <--> offline collaboration.
> 
> anpudan../bala
> ba...@ta...
> 
> p.s. if you want PR success, be thick-skin :-)
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sethu Ramalingam, Anbu Chezhian <anb...@cg...>
> To: <ta...@ta...>; <e-u...@ya...>;
> <eru...@ya...>; <kal...@ya...>;
> <tam...@ya...>; <tam...@ya...>
> Cc: 'prabu anand' <pra...@ya...>
> Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 7:15 AM
> Subject: [tamil] Tamil Linux - Oru Arimugam...
> 
> 
> > Nanbargalae,
> >
> > Tamil Linux patri Tamilil oru siriya arimugam...
> >
> >  <<tamilinux-anbu.pdf>>
> > Endrendrum Anbudan,
> > Anbu. S
> > Singapore.
> 
> 

[Indic-computing-users] Kannada computing mailing list

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

This is from the linux-bangalore.org mailing list. FN
________________________________________________________________________

Message: 3
   Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 10:06:12 -0700
   From: Arun Sharma <ar...@sh...>
Subject: Kannada computing mailing list

If you're interested or know someone who may be interested, please
spread the word:

http://www.sharma-home.net/mailman/listinfo/kannada

The immediate purpose of the list is to coordinate kannada translation
activities for various desktop environments, but broader discussions are
welcome.

        -Arun

PS: Please refer to the archives for recent discussion


________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________



Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 

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

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

Perhaps the best place to carry on the concerns raised at the
indiccomputing Bangalore-2002 workshop would be the indic-computing
mailing list. Could I request Tapan and others who are involved to kindly
follow this up? I will make it a point to forward all relevant posts via
this list. Looking forward to greater discussion for a better
understanding of all the issues involved. Frederick.
--
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

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, L. Suresh Kumar-LSK wrote:


> Mr Anbarasan
> 
> I merely posted a news item. Thats all.
> Please get in touch with Fred, who wrote this news item.
> Hopefully, Fred can answer your questions.
> 
> Suresh
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <apl...@bg...>
> To: <lsk...@ne...>
> Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 11:02 AM
> Subject: FWD : [infitt] Fwd: Towards a vernacular computing environment
> 
> 
> > 
> > Dear Sir,
> > 
> > Can you give some more informations like who has organised the workshorp, 
> > who can be contacted for the proceedings of this workshop etc.
> > 
> > For your information : we have developed some technologies 
> > to takle keyboard problems and thr ISCII barrier etc.
> > 
> > N. Anbarasan
> > 
> > At  Sat, 14 Sep 2002 10:19:03 -0700, "Mani M. Manivannan" <mma...@ea...> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > >From: "L. Suresh Kumar-LSK" <lsk...@ne...>
> > >
> > >http://in.news.yahoo.com/020914/43/1v7vg.html
> > >
> > >Saturday September 14, 4:30 PM
> > >
> > >Towards a vernacular computing environment
> > >
> > >By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service
> > >
> 
> -snip-
> 

[Indic-computing-users] FEATURE: The Penguin's Mantra

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

Would be grateful for feedback, suggestions, corrections in the below.FN
***************************************************************************

THE PENGUIN'S MANTRA: Efforts are on to find Indian language solutions to
GNU/Linux in the subcontinent that matters

By Frederick Noronha

Some call Indic and other South Asian scripts the final challenge to
computer vendors for full I18n support. It has taken its time in coming, the
challenges are not that simple, and successes have been few and far between.
Yet optimism is high now. Can this frontier be conquered early?

South Asia -- home to nearly one-sixth of humanity -- is struggling to
attain regional-language solutions that would make computing accessible to
the commonman. It would throw open the keyboard to hundreds of millions. 
Even if most are poor and have low purchasing power, this could open the
floodgate to greater computing power and much-needed efficiency in a
critical area of the globe.

For sure, GNU/Linux is making its own headway. Even if all this has so far
largely failed to get the attention it deserves. Keep your fingers crossed,
GNU/Linux could throw up some interesting surprises from here.

Come September-end, a number of key proponents of Indianization plan to meet
up in the southern city of Bangalore, which is sometimes called India's
silicon valley. They plan to bring together energetic young developers
working in the space of developing local language development tools,
applications, and content.  It would be a small and informal workshop, with
20-25 core participants, including a lot of free discussion intended to spur
"creative and passionate thought" about the future of local language
computing technologies.

It's not difficult to understand the implications of this endeavour. 

Some Indian regional languages are larger than lingos spoken by whole
countries elsewhere. Take Hindi with its 366 million speakers, second
worldwide in number-terms only to Chinese Mandarin; Telugu with 69 million;
Marathi's 68 million; and Tamil with 66 million. There are another 13 Indian
languages in the top-70 global languages with over 10 million speakers.

Other languages spoken in India are also spoken beyond: like Bengali (207
million speakers in India and Bangladesh), and Urdu (60 million in Pakistan
and India). Naturally, this linguistic space needs to be closely watched. 

Range of initiatives
--------------------

Varied initiatives are currently on in various parts of the country.

One exciting project is the plan to create the Simputer, a simple and
relatively inexpensive computing device that would benefit groups of simple
villagers.

GNU/Linux enthusiasts are optimistic about its potential, specially because
this planned computing device runs on their favourite OS (operating system).
Not just that, the creation of the Simputer is also being undertaken via an
'open' design format, an innovative idea from India which gives a new
meaning to 'open' technology in the hardware world.

This device is seen to have a clear edge over any palm-top. "Palm tops can't
compute in Indian languages and don't have text-to-speech interfaces for
Indian languages. They are also not aimed for the mass market that Simputer
is and still have a more elitist user community," says the early-twenties
developer Abhas Abhinav of Deep Root Linux in Bangalore.

dhvani is a text-to-speech system for Indian languages developed by the
Simputer Trust developers and others. It is promising to soon have a better
phonetic engine, Java port, language independent framework. (See
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhvani/ )

Meanwhile, IMLI is a browser created by the Simputer Trust, and it uses the
IML markup language. It is designed for easy creation of Indian language
content and is integrated with the text-to-speech engine. IMLI can be
independently installed on any Simputer.

In national capital New Delhi and the western touristic state of Goa,
campaigners are struggling to take GNU/Linux to the classroom.
Indian-language solutions could obviously take such a project far ahead than
software restricted to English.

Pankaj Kaushal <pa...@sa...> is an early-twenties free software
activist and web-master at the Sarai.net in Delhi. He says after he finishes
working on his current software project he will "soon be working" primarily
on a Hindi-desktop solution for "either KDE or Gnome or both". "Right now I
am collecting information about what needs to be done," says he.

In Kerala, another southern state with an impressive 90% literacy and whose
language Malayalam is spoken by 35 million people, other ventures are
underway.

Senior local government official Ajay Kumar <kum...@ya...> is
leading an initiative to make GNU/Linux friendly to the South Indian
language of Malayalam. He says: "We propose to develop a renderer for our
language. Specifically, we are looking for a renderer for Pango (the
generic-engine used with the GTK toolkit)."

They's working to get persons who have worked on Malayalam and Unicode to
offer some of their work for this project, specially in fonts. Ajay Kumar
adds that in nine months time, "we want to create an atmosphere were
language computing in Malayalam improves". Says he: "We are confident that
once we deliver the basic framework, others will start localizing more
applications in Malayalam."

Other initiatives have also come up, like the GNU India Translation Project
(GTP) by gnu_india. It aims at the localization of GNU/Linux program into
the native languages of india. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuindia/

Rahul Jindal, some time back,  announced the Hindi-speaking chat robot. 
Deepti hopes to be a Hindi speaking bot, on the lines of Alice
(www.alicebot.org). "We shall use or develop a Hindi TTS for the output and
more frills as time permits," he announced. See
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deepti/

itrans by Avinash Chopde is a package for printing texts in Indian
languages. It uses English-encoded text for input, and it supports the
Devanagiri script (used for writing Hindi and some other Indian languages),
Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, and Romanized Sanskrit.
Input files can be in TeX, LaTeX, HTML, or PostScript format, and Unicode
output is supported. See http://www.aczone.com/itrans/

More importantly, international efforts are also helping India. Yudit, with
its recent 2.5.4 release, announced in recent weeks that it was offering
support in three south Indian languages -- Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. 
Delhi-based GNU/Linux veteran Raj Mathur commented: "The current version of
Yudit has complete support for Malayalam and other indic languages. It can
also use Opentype layout tables of Malayalam fonts. I think Yudit is the
first application that can use Opentype tables for Malayalam."

K Ratheesh was a student of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (at
the south Indian town of Chennai) when he worked on enabling the GNU/Linux
console for local languages, a couple of years ago.

"As the (then) current PSF format didn't support variable width fonts, I
have made a patch in the console driver so that it will load a user-defined
multi-glyph mapping table so that multiple glyphs can be displayed for a
single character code. All editing operations will also be taken care of,"
Ratheesh commented.

Further, as he pointed out, for Indian languages, there are various
consonant/vowel modifiers which result in complex character clusters. "So I
have extended the patch to load user defined context sensitive parse rules
for glyphs and character codes as well. Again, all editing operations will
behave according to the parse rule specifications," he commented. 

Says he: "Even though the patch has been developed keeping Indian languages
in mind, I feel it will be applicable to many other languages (for eg.
Chinese) which require wider fonts on console or user defined parsing at I/O
level." The package, containing the patch, some documentation, utilities and
sample files then weighed around 100 KB.

There are even projects aimed at helping to explores Indian holy books,
written in the ancient religious language of Sanskrit.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ved/

Strategy suggested
------------------

One Indic-Computing Strategy Document, prepared in May 2002, noted that
India faces a unique local-language computing standardization and
capacity-building problem -- apart from other factors. This is simply due to
the wide variety of regional and local languages in wide use. Then, there's
also the organizational and regional obstacles inherent in the effort to
standardize this rich variety of languages.

It mooted a strategy of creating a hierarchy of participatory consortia, to
facilitate broad regional and local participation in standardization and
development from a range of stake-holders with differing areas of expertise.

"It is important that these consortia be participatory and inclusive to
properly represent the viewpoint of local developers, users and other
stake-holders.  We recommend the formation of state-level (regional)
consortia for each regional language, which should include participants from
the following key member groups: developers, technologists,
users/practitioners, linguistic groups...," it added.

Tapan S. Parikh <ta...@ya...> is a US-educated Indo-American who has set
his heart on finding language computing solutions for the land of his
ancestors. says he is working with with colleagues to pull together some
linguistic info for Indian languages, document that and post it to the web.

Says he: "Basically the idea now is to put these guidelines out there and
solicit a lot of feedback on this info from the general community for each
language. From that we can collate the best results and publish in the
handbook.  So we don't want so many questions that people will be
overwhelmed, and we should accept partial responses and the collate the best
answers to each area on our side, but we still want to be comprehensive."

At the end of September's Bangalore meeting, organisers hope to have
assembled a community of technically informed and motivated people to
organize and lead the indic-computing development effort into the future. 

"The leadership of this community should be individual driven, technically
motivated, and entrenched with youth, vitality and a progressive vision,"
say Tapan Parikh, one of the organisers. 

"We also hope that this broad coalition would play in facilitatory role in
helping local language groups interact more effectively with international
standards processes and forums, such as the Unicode Consortium and W3C," say
the organisers.

Which ones first?
----------------

Many issues need to be tackled in the search for solutions. For instance,
which languages need be tackled first?

HP's Bangalore-based technical consultant Joseph Koshy <JK...@Fr...>
argues that the north Indian "Hindi family" promises the greatest reach
population-wise. However, he feels the southern languages -- Kannada,
Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam -- offer the greatest promise of real-world
deployability.  They enjoy better support infrastructure needed to deploy an
effective IT solution, which appears to be better in south India.

Outside his work-life at HP, Joshy is a volunteer-developer of the FreeBSD
operating system and one of the founders of the Indic-Computing project on
SourceForge. Says he: "What I am interested in is helping make
standards-based, interoperable computing for Indian languages a reality. 
This dream is bigger than any one operating system or any one computing
platform.  I want to see pagers, telephones, PDAs and other devices that
have not been invented yet interacting with our people in our native
languages."

But others have different views. Says C V Radhakrishnan
<cv...@ri...>, who himself works out of South India: "I think most
of the South Indian languages should pose much problems for its non-linear
nature, for example, to create conjunct glyphs one has to go back and forth,
while North Indian languages do not have this problem. Malayalam has
peculiar characters called half consonants ('chillu'), there is no
equivalent for this in other languages. This raises severe
computing/programming challenges."

Radhakrishnan is a TeX programmer, who runs the River Valley Technologies
out of Thiruvananthapuram in South India. RVT is solely dependent on free
software with GNU/Linux as the sole operating system and has been in the
business for the last eight years with publishers like Elsevier Science and
Institute of Physics as lead clients. "We've reversed the paradigm that
GNU/Linux is unfit for commercial companies!" says a proud Radhakrishnan.

He has also written four packages in TeX which are licensed under GPL or
LPPL and are available at Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN --
official repository of TeX software). Among these is pdfscreen (a
presentation software) is very widely used in the TeX world.

While this debate goes on -- and the proof would lie in the actual solutions
that come up -- it's clear that some could be 'difficult' languages.

Others say the smaller languages that are traditionally not written, or are
written in non-standard variants of the standard scripts. He points to
SIL.org as a group working on related issues.

FreeBSD developer Koshy notes that the official Census of India lists 114
'major' languages in the sub-continent.  Linguists, who discriminate more
finely than the Census officials, peg the number of living languages in
India at 850+, he says.

Out of the 18 more important 'scheduled' national languages, all except the
Devanagiri-based ones (which use the same script as Hindi) have serious
issues when it comes to representing and processing them on a computer, says
Koshy.

Each language needs its differences to be taken care of. "Solutions which
treat all languages as equivalent have got only limited acceptability," 
argues G Karunakar, another young developer taking a keen interest in this
field.

Wish lists
----------

What would be the applications and solutions required for a good start?

Radhakrishnan's wish-list reads thus: "X window support for local language
(a promising project in this direction is Indix). A good editor that
supports Unicode is the prime requirement. Although 'yudit' supports
Unicode, it is highly insufficient as an editor. Multi-lingual typesetting
system -- Omega (16bit extension of TeX) is a good candidate for this.
Simple mail client like pine or mutt. Browser extended to support local
languages with local language menus."

Says Koshy: "The usual 'paper consumption' uses (i.e.  word processing,
printing etc) are always there. But I think that the greatest demand would
be for what I call 'relevant information' for the lack of a better name."

Content is also critical. Requirements vary widely. 

It all depends on where computers are used, argues Koshy. For instance, the
Garhwal region could need a matrimonial service uniting its people scattered
around the world. Those in eastern town of Assansol might need information
about tobacco or tea markets, the locally-important produce.

Some stress the need for the basics -- enabling the user to type, save and
print documents in his language(s), the ability to share files with others,
a chance to read and send e-mail, and the opportunity to browse and search
the Net in her language. 

Other wants come up fast too: Indian GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Galeon, and
Konqueror; an office suite; and instant messaging solutions. 

There has been much debate over where in X should the language stuff go --
whether in the client side or server side. Server side implementation like
Indix and the IIT-Madras Xlib work good, but find limited acceptability.
Modifications they have made have not been accepted into mainstream X
servers. This mean mainstream distros like Redhat, Mandrake, Debian will not
have it, though back in India it can be an add-on.

There is the X extension approach eg XOM (X output method), being worked on
by a team in Sun microsystems, according to Karunakar.

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.

On the font level, there is no font-encoding standard. ISFOC was aimed to be
one, but it has become synonymous as a CDAC encoding & lack of a document
describing it has left it being ignored in GNU/Linux solutions.

But which are priority applications? "Everything. Don't take 'No' for an
answer", argues Edward Cherlin <ed...@we...> who creates
multi-lingual Web sites, and is active in internationalization standards and
implementation. He's based in Cupertino, CA. 

On GNU/Linux, Cherlin points out, you can volunteer to Indicize any
application. In the future, when font management and rendering are
standardized, all applications will run in Indian languages for input and
output without further ado, and anyone will be able to create a localization
file to customize the user interface. Volunteers are also needed to
translate documentation," says Cherlin.

Other OSs
---------

Experts in the field are also studying the progress of other OSs. 

Some argue that today only Microsoft's WinXP has any kind of Indian language
support worth speaking about.  But this is based on the current Unicode
version (3.x) and hence suffers from all the problems of Unicode based
solutions: inability to represent all the characters of some Indian
languages, and awkwardness in text processing.

Microsoft faces other problems too. 

"When Microsoft came up with the South Asian edition of MS-Word, the fonts
had a lot of problems. Mostly, words were rendered as separate letters with
space in between and not combined together as is the case with most Indian
languages," says PicoPeta language technology specialist Kalika Bali.
PicoPeta is one of the firms working to create the Simputer.

Support for Indian languages in the open-source OSes is today confined to a
series of hacks and ad-hoc 'solutions', argues Koshy.  Unicode support in
the open-source OSes is itself still coming in (and slowly too).

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja <pav...@vi...>, a former scientist now
widely noticed for his determined work to push computing in the influential
south Indian language of Kannada (see www.vishvakannada.com), however sees
the progress as being "quite remarkable, compared with the scene about two
years ago". Says Pavanaja: "Current pricing and product activation of XP may
become a boon for GNU/Linux (since software 'piracy' would be more
difficult)."

Cherlin is optimistic. Says he: "By next year, the Pango project should
support all nine official Indic scripts, so the answer (to which languages
should be tackled at this stage) is 'all of them'."

As Cherlin argues, Indic and other South Asian scripts are the final
challenge to computer vendors for full I18n support. "Progress is slow at
Microsoft and Apple. Linux should pass them by the end of the year, or early
in 2003," he feels.

"Apple and Microsoft are not willing simply to support typing, display, and
printing. They will not release language and writing system support until
they have complete locales built, preferably including a dictionary and
spelling checker. Linux is under no such constraints," says Cherlin. 

His points out that the Free Standards Group together with Li18nux.org are
proposing to rationalize and simplify I18n support under X, including a
common rendering engine, shared font paths, and other standards that will
greatly simplify the business of supporting all writing systems and all
languages. Cherlin feels that Yudit and emacs both support several Indic
scripts, and could be extended with only moderate effort on the part of a
few experts.

Mandrake Linux includes Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi Devanagari, and
Tamil out of the box. That leaves Oriya, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada
still to be done, along with the Indic-derived Lao, Sinhala, Myanmar, and
Khmer. Tibetan and Thai are moderately well supported, Cherlin contends.

"Recently, localization efforts are picking up," agrees scientist-free
software advocate in Mumbai, Nagarajuna G.

"Other operating systems have their own funds for R&D.  GNU/Linux depends on
volunteers and external financial support.  If the government or other
funding agencies can spare even some amount to bodies like Free Software
Foundation of India, and others who are active in the localization
initiative the developers can work with obsession and make this happen very
fast.  FSFIndia is presently working with Kerala government to produce
Malayalam support to the GNOME desktop," notes Nagarajuna.

Incidentally, the 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.

Technical challenges
--------------------

Technical challenges are certainly not few: the X rendering model is too
simple for Indic scripts (but an upcoming tutorial on the Indic Computing
site will have the nitty-gritty). Input for Indian languages is an open
issue. Most `keyboard solutions' available today for X are fragile and are
really more work-arounds than solutions.

In Cherlin's view, the principal problem is rendering conjuncts without
proper rendering engines and properly encoded fonts. Users want to type a
sequence of characters, and not concern themselves with the details of
rendering.  This requires fonts with appropriate tables giving the possible
character sequences and the glyphs for rendering each, and an engine that
knows to read the tables.

Recently, at the user-interface level, GNOME/Gtk teams tried rendering
Unicode encoded Devanagari (Hindi's script).  But this is specific to GTK
and doesn't extend to the other X toolkits, adds Koshy.

Says Koshy: "I don't know of any non-X user interface toolkits that support
Indian languages. General text processing toolkits -- a toolkit or library
that helps in manipulating Indian language text, for sorting, searching,
storage and retrieval -- are not known to me.  We don't even have the
necessary technical information about 90% of our languages that we can use
to get started on such a toolkit."

For desktop class machines, current font technology (TTF, OpenType, Type 1,
etc) is capable of handling Indic scripts.  Availability of good-quality
fonts is another matter; but, as Koshy puts it, this is not really a show
stopper. Display technology for embedded devices (pagers, small devices) for
Indian languages is not well developed.

Languages like Urdu and Sindhi have right-to-left scripts which look similar
to Arabic but are, in fact, different, argues Prakash Advani who some years
back launched the FreeOS.com initiative. Urdu is the main language of
Pakistan, but is also used in India.

"I have found a great problem with typesetting of technical documents and
school/college text books particularly in the disciplines of math, physics
and chemistry. Why this happens is the lack of local language support for
TeX, the world's best math typesetting system. When an operating system does
not support the education in local language, the purpose of usage of
computers is extremely diluted," argues argues C V Radhakrishnan.

Satish Babu <sb...@in...>, a Free Software enthusiast and Vice President of
InApp, an Indo-US software company dealing with Free & Open Source
solutions, points to other problems: Collation (sorting) order confusion
(oftentimes, there is no unique 'natural' collation order, and one has to be
adopted through standardization).

Then there's also the non-availability of dictionaries and thesauri in
Indian languages and issues arising out of multiple correct spellings for
words; encoding standardization (Unicode) that will, inter alia, facilitate
transliteration between Indian languages programme support (database,
spreadsheet) for sorting/searching two-byte strings; lack of support of some
languages (eg., Tulu, Konkani, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri) which are the
mother-tongues for some sections of our population.

Ravikant <rav...@sa...> who taught History at Delhi University before
moving to the Language and New Media project of sarai.net, says: "The long
term solution is of course Unicode and the package Yudit already works on
both Linux and Windows. Using the package you can write e-mails, by
cut-paste on any of the browsers -- the new Mozilla and IE; host web-pages --
in short, write html."

For short-term measures, he suggests working towards developing the existing
packages "in a manner that people can use them with freedom from OS's and
fonts". ITRANS and WRITE32, written by Indians settled abroad, are
transliteration packages which already do so. The LATEX-Devnag package is
being used and promoted by Mahatma Gandhi International University, Delhi.

Then, there are packages that, according to Ravikant, do not offer OS
freedom. These are for Windows only: Baraha (www.baraha.com), I-Leap and
IndiaPage (mithi.com).

Says Prakash Advani <pr...@ne...> of the freeos.com initiative:
"There is definitely a market for Indian language computing that exists
today but there is a huge untapped market. 95% of the population don't
read/write English. If we can provide them a low cost Indian language
computer, it will be a killer." But as important as the office suite and
browser is getting across Indian-language content, says he. 

Says Prakash Advani: "The biggest challenge in not technical but lack of
standards. Till Unicode happened, there was a complete lack of standards.
Everyone was following their own standards of input, storage and output of
data."

Unicode brings in standardisation. But not all is hunky dory. Issues remain,
like: not everyone agrees to Unicode even though it is an international
standard; not all the applications are Unicode-enabled but things are
getting there; most Indian language web sites don't support Unicode; not all
operating systems support Unicode.

There is a lack of free Indian language fonts. "There are over 5000
commercial Indian language fonts but there are probably 10 Free (GPL/royalty
free) Indian language fonts. This is a serious issue and more efforts should
be made to release free fonts," says Prakash Advani. 

One other view is that GNU/Linux's GUI is a soup of various protocols and
toolkits and there is no single point where Indian languages can be
incorporated. GTK and Qt has separate projects for i18n, but neither one is
sufficient. IndiX takes a different route and works at the X level. Over all
the whole process awkward, in one word.

Besides, others point out, fonts are another mess altogether. Most of the
current implementations rely on glyph locations to display and store
information. For instance, to represent the latter "a" what is stored is the
position of "a" in some particular font used by that package. This is
different from normal English where the ASCII standard specifies that to
represent "a" the number 65 has to be used. No such standard exists for
Indian languages and thus one document written in one language cannot be
opened in another application. This is also the reason why in Indian
web-pages particular fonts specified by the author must be used.

Such a situation is also used by vendors to lock in their customers to a
particular product. This also hampers the exchange of email to situations
only where both the parties have same web interface or program to use an
Indian language email.

TUGIndia, which Raj represent, has procured a Malayalam font (Keli) from
font designer Hashim and will convert it to Opentype and distribute it under
GNU GPL. The project is expected to be completed by September 2002. Raj
works as an engineer at Linuxense Information systems, and leads the Indian
TeX users group's localization project.

Says Karunakar: "There are very few people in India who understand Fonts
technology completely, so most fonts that are available are buggy. Due to
lack of font standard, our fonts are not tagged as a Indian language font."

Right now a general consensus seems to be building on Opentype Fonts as the
suitable technology for Indian language fonts. There is already a free
Devanagari font ('Raghu' by Dr RK Joshi, NCST and used in Indix), a Kannada
Opentype from KGP, also for Malayalam, Telugu and Bengali.

"A lot of know how is existing in rare books, which are difficult to get.
Lot of research work done by scholars, linguists, typographers etc is going
untapped, as we don't know of it, or the people who know it," adds Karunakar.

Lack of information
-------------------

Call it challenges, or call them difficulties; they are waiting to be
solved.

Koshy says: "Well the *biggest* problem I see today is the lack of
information, in a form useful to a software developer.  Most of the
developers for open-source projects (and this holds true for closed-source
companies too) are not Indians."

"Though we Indians claim to be a software `super power', we apparently
aren't very good at producing working code.  For example, the core work in
bringing Devanagari support into GTK has been done by a few Europeans; the
`Indian' contribution has been in providing translations of application
messages," as he puts it. 

Given this situation, campaigners at the ground level are saying its
imperative that information needed to implement language support be made
widely available so that whoever is interested -- be they Czech or
Scandinavian or Bengali -- can add Indian language support to the code base
that they maintain.

In term of voice synthesis and recognition, Indian languages face challenges
too. Language technology specialist Kalika Bali points to the lack of easily
available annotated speech corpora to train language/statistical models for
creating state-of-art TTS and ASR engines. 

"This is especially the case for ASR as one would need to train the models
for dialectal variation if they were to be deployed in a semi-urban
environment. How many people actually use the standard Sanskrit-influenced
'Doordarshan' version of Hindi (used by the Indian government's main TV
channel) for their daily interaction, for example?" Bali asks. 

Free Software advocate for education and research, the Mumbai-based Dr.
Nagarjuna G. lists the problem bluntly: "Lack of standards, lack of good
quality fonts available in the public domain.  Governments are spending lots
of tax payers money in the development of technologies and fonts, which
either are not following standards are the products are not freely
available."

Shrinath <shr...@ko...>, a senior staff scientist at
Mumbai's NCST, which has done some interesting work on this subject, says:
"We want Indian language programming to be as simple as programming for
English is today. Almost every company has to reinvent the wheel or buy
costly solutions from others. In English, the OS supports it. It's a chicken
and egg problem. If there are apps in indic, the OS vendors will build the
fundamental capabilities into the OS, and if the capabilities are built in,
there will be more apps."

"English has been de-facto language for software development as well as
usage. So there is a long way to go. China is working fast on that end as it
appears, so can we," argues Girish S, an electronics engineer from the
Central Indian region of Madhya Pradesh and set up apnajabalpur.com.

There are other needs too: dictionaries and spelling checkers, of course.
Word-breaking doesn't operate the same way in Indic scripts as in the Latin
alphabet. And fine typography, which you don't find in consumer or office
applications in any language. 

One major challenge are the sheer numbers. India is believed to have 1652
mother tongues, of which 33 are spoken by people numbering over a hundred
thousand. (END OF MAIN ARTICLE)

**************************************************************************
SEPARATE BOX ITEM PLEASE: 
Finding an Indian tongue for the Penguin
**************************************************************************

Support for Indian languages is coming in slowly. But there are several
efforts going towards this end:

* IndLinux project  
http://www.indlinux.org  / http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/indlinux
A volunteer group working at the desktop level (KDE/GNOME), using Unicode,
but ISCII, the Indian standard character interface and South Asian
equivalent of ASCII, will also be supported by providing converter tools,
Current focus on Opentype fonts development, translations for GNOME 2.0 .

This group aims to play the integrating role, on putting all the pieces
together to make it usable. Now, a distributed approach is being taken, to
encourage encourage people to take up localization for their language. There
are now volunteers from more remote areas like Bhopal, Jabalpur, Nainital
etc apart from regular centres like Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore. 

Current work is on  Gnome 2 translations, to make it simple to use so that
all the user needs to do is either change his language or keyboard layout.
Also in progress is having making a Hindi enabled version of upcoming Redhat
7.3.93 (Limbo) which will probably become Redhat 8.0. So you will now have
option of installing in Hindi.

* IndiX  http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
A modified X server to support Indian languages using opentype fonts. Uses
Unicode. Seeks to bring Indic support at the OS level on GNU/Linux.  Others
too agree that NCST's (the Govt of India's Mumbai-based National Centre for
Software Technology) localization work is promising, both for Indix and
OpenOffice in Hindi.

* IITM indlinux  http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/
From the prestigious IIT-Madras in the south Indian city of Chennai. They
have modified X & console in kernel to support Indian languages. Use ISCII
encoding only.

* Linux Localization Initiative ( LLI ) - lli.linux-bangalore.net
A volunteer group working on translating  LDP documentation (starting with
HOWTOs) to Indian languages.

* Indic-computing project.  indic-computing.sourceforge.net
Aims to create a resource center for all Indian language issues in
computing. It is aggregating all language info in one place, so that its lot
easier for developers in future.

* Language Technology Resource center (LTRC), IIIT Hyderabad. -
http://www.iiit.net/ltrc/index.html
They have developed language dictionaries, plug-in for viewing ISCII, and
font converters. Also doing a machine based translation tool (Anusaaraka).
Most of their work is release under GNU GPL.

Indix, IITM and IIIT-Hyderabad's work is supported by the Government of
India. The rest are volunteer-based and "looking for funds". 

J. Patricia Annie JebaMalar <pa...@la...> updates us on some
interesting GNU/Linux and other OS work happening in South India, in the
Tamil language heartland and nearby.

* http://www.chennaikavigal.com
* http://www.tamillinux.org                 

Some other projects earning notice: 

A team doing good work is the IITM team [http://acharya.iitm.ernet.in/];
the algorithms/approach are interesting. 

Says scientist-turned-editor Dr Pavanaja: "Mithi Technologies, the
Pune-based firm, have done good job on the web server front. This is quite
thought-off effort, as the majority of the web servers run on Linux-Apache.
They have good future. Let us hope best for them."

There are also international projects that could benefit Indian computer
users: Pango, Graphite, Li18nux, Free Standards. Mandrake Linux which
emphasizes multi-lingual support and welcomes offers of help. And of course
India's own attempt at building a people-friendly low-cost computing device
the Simputer (www.simputer.org). 

http://www.parabaas.com/Parabaas_Axar/index.html (Bangla editor for Linux,
Java-based, runs on all platforms)

There's also the Indian language work by a team in the International
Institute for Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad. They have been doing
good work in areas of machine translation, linguistics, dictionaries etc.
and much their work is available under GNU GPL. 

There are two international projects to create a complete rendering engine:
Pango (Pango.org, Li18nux.org) and Graphite (sil.org). India could gain from
these. They also have plans for complete sets of Unicode fonts (including
not just the Unicode characters, but also all of the non-character glyphs
for rendering Indic scripts. -FN (END OF BOX ITEM) 

--
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
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