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

[Rajkumar S.]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Satyakam Goswami wrote:

> 1. Unicode is a stupid. it doesnt exist. it doesnt work. if you wrote
> something for unicode, you can keep it.

This is a very myopic view of the whole thing. I cannot understand why
people refuse to move forward. Unicode is the future whether you like
it or not. All the major OS will support *only* unicode. All of the
ISCII is going to be doomed in a matter of one or two years. The way
Indian languages are handled in Win XP should be an eye opener for all
the ISCII fans. Please understand - Change or be doomed.

We have working Unicode renderer for most of the Indian languages for
Pango. I cannot understand why you said that "it doesnt exist. it
doesnt work" For your kind information - It does exist and it does
work.

Please change the wrong notion that Indian scripts are the only
languages in the World. Their are others also.

> 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.

Do you have any working rendering engine for this. Any way to have a
single text file with Urdu and Malayalam in it?

> 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).

For your kind information Govt of Kerala will use only Unicode.

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

You can contact Taichi KAWABATA <batta@beige.ocn.ne.jp> for
devanagiri rendering for emacs. And they are using Unicode.

> 4. finally, there is already a large amount of code available for ISCII.

It is almost a trivial transformation to convert from ISCII to
Unicode.

raj