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Telugu Translations at Full Spead

Posted in Indian Langauge Computing by Sunil Mohan Adapa on the April 21st, 2005

I just talked to Kiran Chandra of FSF India Andra Pradesh Chapter. His team is working on Telugu translations for GNU/Linux and finished some GNOME modules and applications. Also made a new OTF font called Srujana! Yeeehaah! another OTF font for Telugu. There are some problems with the font and translations, but I am sure the issues will be ironed out very very soon. The fonts and translated files are available at http://ap.gnu.org.in. There is also an XKB map that is supposedly more convenient for DTP publishers all over AP.

Kiran told me that his team can finish the translations in a matter for few months. We will be working together from now on. Status updates and releases will be happen at http://telugu.sarovar.org.

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Software and Indian language support

Posted in Indian Langauge Computing by Sunil Mohan Adapa on the April 18th, 2005
Many people looking for Indian language support for computers or even some people working on providing the support have a notion that Indian language support is a like providing a piece of software like word processor that works with Indian languages. This is a very incorrect understanding. Indian language user should have all the choice that an English speaking user has. All software should have Indian language support. As someone rightly said, "If a software does not support a language, it should be treated as a bug in that software". We should never build a software with the specific purpose of supporting Indian languages. We should work towards making all software have Indian language support. Similarly, we may build distro CDs for a particular purpose like demos etc. but we should never build a distro for "Indian language support". If there are 350 distros then we should have 350 distros with Indian language support. They should be seen as 350 ways to reach Indian langauge users.

sunthosh,

Here is my favorite multilinugual editor: gedit. It has near perfect rendering for almost all major scripts in the world. Do you need ITRANS or will any phonetic notation will do? If a phonetic notation will do, see my article on setting up keyboard to install RTS or WX keyboards. If you need only ITRANS you may prepare one easily using the scripts in the above package.

Infact, most editors in GNOME will have this multilingual capability. For example, I write Indic text in sticky notes, evolution mail client etc.

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Firefox 1.0.2 Indic enabled build

Posted in Indian Langauge Computing by Sunil Mohan Adapa on the April 14th, 2005

There are several security problems with firefox 1.0. Firefox 1.0.1 fixed many and firefox 1.0.2 fixed the rest. Ofcourse, these are needed in the ealier firefox 1.0 pango build I have made. So me and my team mate Manish made a new build of firefox 1.0.2 with pango patches. This build is much better than the previous one.

  • The build is now an installer. So it is easy to install.
  • This one has more pango patches including the selection patch and more patches from fedora CVS.
  • The earlier build had a problem that it was asking for some strange libraries (libdnet) as depdencies. Well, this one has entirely same requirements as official firefox build.
  • Earlier build required you to install latest pango first. But, that is a pain for most users in most distributions. This build has a solution to it. The system does not need latest pango for this build. The installer comes with pango libraries of its own.

BTW, while making this build, I encoutered a bug in the installer and fixed it. Yey! my first contribution (yes, I’d like to call it contribution) to the browser born for world domination. Also had to make a small change to pango to make it work from anywhere instead of standard locations.

It wil take some time to put it for download on sarovar. Apparently, sarovar is not taking large releases (about 10m) in a straight forward way. So I put it for download here. Get it now! Here is the old screenshot.

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Life is going great

Posted in Random by Sunil Mohan Adapa on the April 11th, 2005
Well, I had a great birthday on March 29. Probably the best yet. Lots of people, lots of bumps, lots of wishes and lots of gifts. Pictures of midnight screems have been up in the gallery.

I have also been reading quite a lot (by my standard) of novels. I have finished some

Lord of the Rings (this one was presented to me by OSK).
The Da Vinci Code
The Foundation
Prelude to the Foundation
and I am also reading The Hithhickers Guide to the Galaxy.

I lost my (actually Yaswanth’s :) , how convinient) mobile. The problem is that I have lost on April 1st. Damn! does it have to be April 1st. That did send a message in big banners across the city. Nevermind, I got over it.

The project is going nicely at a steady pace. Quite a bit to my satisfaction.

I have been thinking of writing a science fiction story just for my amusement. Guys give me some push.

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