[Fwd: [FSF India] Localization of GNU/Linux to Indian languages]]

[Satyakam Goswami]

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [FSF India] Localization of GNU/Linux to Indian languages]
From: "Ashhar Farhan" <afarhan@rediffmail.com>
To: "Satyakam Goswami" <goswami@archeanit.com>

goswami -
pse forward it to fsf, your forwarded mail did not contain the email ids of
the originators.


gentlemen (and the occaisional lady) -

there are a couple of issues here that need your attention:
1. unicode is a stupid. it doesnt exist. it doesnt work. if you wrote
something for unicode, you can keep it. what works in india are two major
standards  a) - the ISCII (the indian standard code for information
interchange). the iscii standard, inspite of its name, doesnt cover all the
indian languages. it covers only those that derive their written script from
pali. this standard was first proposed and then developed by the legendary
mohan tambe. those of you who are in bangalore must track down this beast and
point him towards FSF. probably he is already a part of the movement but
snoring. b) the PASCII (the perso-arabic standard code for information
interchange). there are a number of indian languages written in perso-arabic
script. Urdu is the most famous of them. the other languages are sindhi, old
gujarati, saraiki, dongri, etc. the PASCII, is now on standards track, was
written by (ahem!) yours truely.

2. the biggest user of indian language computing is the government, and they
want ISCII and PASCII. they dont understand Unicode (finally a sane
decision). so if you want to do railway reservation charts, DTP, electrol
rolls, etc. ISCII + PASCII is your friend.

3. write to rms for handa's contacts. handa got devanagri going on emcas.
there is also a version floating around for arabic.

4. finally, there is already a large amount of code available for ISCII. i
have seen a complete xterm run a devangri shell under linux. most of this
work is due to rajeev sanghal (goose, put in his email id here...).

professor sangals mail id is sangal@iiit.net



5. on the net, a large number of devnagri fonts are available in TTF (and
they can be easily converted to PostScript. download them.

btw, anyone knows whatever happened to freetype.org ?

de -

farhan@hotfoon.com


 


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