Indic Computing

Introduction

These days, computers are becoming common-place in Indian cities as well as in rural areas. With more and more Indians depending on computers to get their work done, the traditional lack of support for Indian languages in computers is becoming prominent. There are a lot of issues - technical and social - in introducing what has come to be called Indic Computing ... computing, in Indian Languages!

This section of my website is an effort to document existing tools and projects that target specific problems in this area. The section is meant as a show-case of the issues involved as well as the advantages gained from Indic Computing. Most of the material is meant as an introduction for the lay user, with very little assumptions about technical background. I decided to create this section after posting a rather lengthy message on a mailing list, explaining to some non-techie people, the importance of standard encodings, for multilingual computing environments.

Existing Solutions

A lot of institutions and individuals have tried to provide Indic computing solutions, but most of them are based on half-baked technology, that doesn't really appreciate the basic problems in supporting Multilingual Environments in Computing. Examples are the various fonts, transliteration engines, add-ons to Microsoft Word, etc. Most of the solutions amount to fooling the computer as well as the user, into thinking they are dealing with a multilingual document, without ever addressing the real issue.

My intention in building this website is not to undermine the importance of these solutions - they provided an excellent tool where none existed. But their days are coming to an end; its time to move to better technically sound solutions, that are designed to work into the future, and across all applications in a seamless manner.

Looking to the future

As an example of what are the possibilities, consider the following screenshot of a recent version of MSN messenger, running on Windows 2000. I am sure most people will appreciate that this is not possible simply using a "devanagari font" like the one's that are popularly available on the web.

MSN Messenger showing a conversation in Marathi

Here's another screenshot, showing Windows Explorer, the file manager used by Windows 2000. The screenshot shows the contents of a folder that I named in Devnagari, and even the textfile inside has a name in Devnagari. As you can see, Windows has no problems displaying these names!

Windows Explorer showing files with Devnagari names

It was possible to chat in Marathi because my system as well as the system that my friend uses, both support a standard called "Unicode". We'll talk more about this elsewhere, but the important thing to note here, is that the operating system itself now understands languages other than English ... this is far different from having just a font that can display Devnagari text.