[Indic-computing-devel] javascript indic renderer and community portals

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

Hi Friends,

   We see a lot of community portals coming up these days based on
CMS like *nuke. But one of these CMS supports Indic. Also we dont see
any community discussion boards in Indian languages (Pls correct me). 

Some issues I see are:

 - There is no indic(Unicode/Non unicode) support in most platforms. 
 - Most browsers doesnt support unicode. 

Any community portal we build should be based on font encoding
systems, at least for some more time. A idea is store
the data in Unicode and then convert to font encoding at the server
side.  A special proxy should help here.

Second issues is entering data from the client side. This is major
prob. Most of the sites uses Java applets for entering the data in
local languages. This may require good amount of modification in the
CMS we have now like *nuke. 

What about Javascript ?  When user types in a text field using some
Transliteration scheme or Inscript KeyBoard layout convert it to font
encoding scheme and show Indic on the fly. Data will be posted to CMS
based on unicode or font encoding scheme. Theme change should be sufficiant 
get *nukes support Indic(I've not looked into *nuke code in detail. Just a guess) 

Yesterday I made a proto of this. A crude one. It works. 

Do you think this will be of use ? If so I will work on it and
make the code better and generic(I dont know Javascript much , will have to
learn it first). 


Arun.