Hello,
Mr. Mark Leisher has already given the URL of a good source of Indian
language software.
On Fri, 20 Feb 1998 Brendan_Murray/DUB/Lotus@lotus.com wrote:
> This is another of those dreadful systems that's going to make life very
> hard for anyone to translate Indic data to Unicode. Basically, the Indic
> glyphs replace the Latin alphabetics so the system will display the
> required glyph instead of the letter. Note that these Indic glyphs are
> really only partial characters which are juxtapositioned to provide the
> display required, i.e. they don't follow ISCII or any other standard. NT5 &
> Win98 are going to have a lot of fun supporting the legacy data produced
> using these fonts.
We agree with you and you are talking about some of the most expedient
approach taken for Indian scripts. If you wish to get a full report on
this approach, pls. write to gist@cdac.ernet.in
These fonts don't even have consistency within the same script and are
generally made by experimenters for getting easy publicity by
distributing them free. You may NOT expect large amount of worthwhile
data created using such adhoc approaches.
There is nothing to worry about on this front as all de-facto standard
implementations by CDAC, Apple, Oracle, and lot a more to come.... conform
to ISCII. And this is because it is representing the language
structure and addresses a variety of coding requirements across the
platforms and applications.
> >
That said, the display looks good, and it's easy to use. > > Brendan
Although they claim to be phonetic English, they have only demo value.
And even rendition quality is far below the requirements due to direct
superimposition of English keyboarding onto the font coding mechanism. As
soon as you enter a page using such fonts, you will notice the
inconsistency and partial phonetics of input with lot more exceptions.
There are better approaches which allow people to use the languages more
effectively and they also conform to ISCII (and Unicode-2). To get a better
experience on what Indian languages are capable of, download the
LEAP-Lite package from CDAC's Web site and see the ease of use.
Internal storage is in ISCII. Keyboarding can be done on
Inscript-phonetic, typewriter, or TRUE-Phonetic English keyboard
layouts. CDAC's ISFOC font coding is an open standard for long and is now
being followed by major ISVs and Web sites in India.
For getting a glimpse on popular applications and also on relevant issues
you may visit www.cdac.org.in and there is lot more which is going to
unfold in near future.
Regds
Anupam
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anupam Saurabh Email: anupam@cdac.ernet.in
Group Co-ordinator GIST R&D, C-DAC Phone: +91-212-370034, 352461
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing URL : http://www.cdac.org.in
Pune University Campus, Pune-411007, India Fax : +91-212-357551
* Download Free LEAP-Lite from our Web Site or sendmail to free@cdac.ernet.in
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:39 EDT