infundibulum

DIT gives push to language software : HindustanTimes.com

The contents of the free CD will include Hindi language true type fonts with keyboard driver, Hindi Language Unicode Compliant Open Type Fonts, generic fonts code and storage code converter for Hindi, Hindi language version of Bharateeya OO, Firefox Browser in Hindi, Multi Protocol Messenger in Hindi, Email Client in Hindi among others.

This is forward-thinking on the part of the Indian government; for a long time it seemed to be the case that the only major website that encoded Hindi in UTF-8 was a foreign site, BBCHindi. Most news sites in Hindi use any of a bewildering array of proprietary encodings, with a proprietary font to accompany it. (Intended presumably to lock in users).

But India is a country which stands to benefit more than most from Unicode: not only does it have a huge variety of languages, it has a large number of scripts (which are already defined in Unicode). Standardizing on a single character set will make it much easier to localize software and spread digital literacy.

And literacy, period…

Whether these efforts will be officially extended to other languages and scripts in India remains to be seen, but the fact that it’s been done in Unicode for Hindi will make the path much easier.

Incidentally, all of this is related to other domains besides news — email, for instance. Consider one blogger’s criticism of Yahoo Mail… gaping void: Why Yahoo will not be my primary mail client?)

See also: वेब पर हिन्दी - हिन्दी - hindi A blog on the Hindi language, in Hindi and English.