C-DAC launches localized software for north-east

DELHI, INDIA: Center for development of advanced computing (C-DAC), the premier R&D organization of the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MC&IT), Government of India under its Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme on Saturday announced that it would be releasing a set of 4 CDs of language software tools and fonts CD for the Bodo, Dogri, Maithali and Nepali language respectively, for free public usage at a function to be held at India International Centre.

It is a part of a national initiative by the DIT, MC&IT to proliferate the use of Indian languages in Information Technology, said a press release.

Software tools and fonts for Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati and Sanskrit have also been released earlier, as part of this initiative, the release added.

“Much of the existing Indian Language data needs to be converted to Unicode for bringing it on the web for which converters have been provided on the language CDs. The tools provided on these CDs are Unicode complaint and easy to use which will have multiplying effect on the creation of multilingual websites.” said Swaran Lata, director and head, technology development for Indian languages (TDIL) programme.

She further added, “With TDIL 6 years efforts, Vedic Sanskrit will get encoded in the next release of UNICODE standard and the enormous knowledge embedded in our ancient Vedas will become accessible to modern generation. Under TDIL programme, we are working towards a wired world www which shatters the English barrier.”

Each CD for the four languages contains numerous tools for usage by the common man, the release added.

The tools include True type fonts with keyboard drivers, Unicode compliant Open Type fonts, Unicode compliant Open type Keyboard driver.

It also features localized version of Bharateeya Open Office, Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, Multiprotocol messenger (PIDGIN), Unicode based bilingual dictionary, Sunbird calendar application, Scribus page layout application, Content Management System.

“The unique multilingual nature of India poses a great challenge and opportunity as India moves to adopt IT in a big way. Making IT available in local languages is imperative to ensure that benefit of this revolution reaches the common man and the pervasive nature of ICT offers enormous social and transformational impact on the daily lives of the common man.” said Ramakrishnan, director general, C-DAC.

“We hope this programme will help accelerate widespread adoption of applications through desk-top, laptops, and Internet in a convenient and friendly way by the masses,” he added.