[Fsf-friends] Good News!

[Nagarjuna G.]

A very good news.  I am just coming from a meeting with
Mr. M.S. Sridhar (of Cyberscape Multimedia Limited) and Prof. Jitender
Shaw (VJTI, Mumbai).  Sridhar is releasing the Indian Language TTF
fonts (more than hundred) under GPL today the the birthday of Mahatma
Gandhi.  He has fonts for all the languages.  The press release and
release note will be posted by evening.  I wanted to break the news to
all of you. We have been trying to have this meeting happen, but it
happened today. The fonts will be putup on FSF-India's website for
download, as well as their companies web site.  The details will be
announced soon.  I will put it up on the FSF site as soon as I get the
CD. We can also put them up at indic-computing site at sourceforge.

Now the task is to make use of the set of TTF fonts and solve the
immediate problem of encoding and rendering with TTF fonts in all the
Indian Languages and release the GNU/Linux distro with GNOME
applications enabled by January 26.  The next task is to convert these
fonts to Open Type fonts as soon as possible.

Mr. Sridhar is only anticipating from the free software community the
technical know how so that their company will also start developing
applications under GNU/Linux OS, and also help us solve the problem of
converting TTF to OTF.  

I hope this news will add momentum to the efforts of localization. I
wish to thank on behalf of the free software community Sridhar and
also Jitender Shaw for initiating this process and making this happen.
I think this gesture of Sridhar will be a slap on the face of CDAC and
other both Govt and private companies who are refusing to share such
resources.

Nagarjuna