[Indic-computing-users] Re: Indic-computing-users digest

[Amit M. <am...@on...>]

Dear Pavanaja,

I agree that the government should mandate support for Indian languages 
and standardize input-output mechanisms among the vendors. Else,
since we Indians manage to "make-do" with English interfaces, there is 
no incentive among the vendors to support local languages.

Is there any government body we can write to in this regard?

On a different track, the Airtel WAP site on the phone manages to
provide Hindi links as text-images, i.e., the Hindi text displayed
is actually a .wbmp format  image.

Do you see value in developing a library that would convert transliterated
text into Indian language character images? This could be a short term 
measure till proper Unicode and font support becomes available on handsets.....

  Amit


>
> Hello,
>
> Unfortunately there is so much deserving to be accomplished in this area.
> Some phones do allow Hindi. But they are limited to SMS and they do not
> follow any standard like Unicode. Hence if you send Hindi SMS from Reliance
> CDMA phone, it will appear as junk on a GSM phone.
>
> There are smartphones from Microsoft. They are Unicode enabled. But again
> the rednering of Indic opentype fonts is not present.
>
> On Java front, once again, so much is deserving.
>
> I am afraid, this being a highly promising area, people will jump into
> this, employing their own encoding and rendering mechanism, just as they
> did 20 years ago in the Indian language DTP and computing area. This will
> lead to the same chaos we had in computers w.r.t. Indic.
>
> It is high time that Govt must step-in and standardize the implementation
> of Indic on mobile phones, smart devices, etc. Best thing to do is that
> people should adopt some standard like Unicode and device a mechanism for
> input and display of Indic for Unicode on these devices.
>
> Thanks and regards,
> Pavanaja
>