Keyboard cacophony

Kripa Raman

WITH all the hype about turning India into an IT superpower one wonders why the use of Indian languages on computers has not quite taken off. In fact, many horizontal portals, including Rediff.com, have done away with one, more, or all of their Indian language versions.

One obvious reason is that both computer and Internet usage is mostly confined to the English-speaking population of the country and that supply, naturally, would cater to them first.

There are other, technological reasons too, say software writers. Most of the Indian language software packages do not offer complete front-end facilities in Indian languages. One has to approach the software through commands in English which defeats the purpose of offering something in an Indian language.

The other reason is that most of the Indian language software fonts developed are proprietary ones and not based on a common code. For instance, the Indian languages portal group Webduniya has its own fonts for various languages, Sify.com has its own and the like. These portals have either developed their fonts in-house or have got someone else to write the software for them.

What does it mean for the user, when one has fonts which are based on different codes? It means that certain very basic functions are not possible, says a Computer Society of India member. For example, it is possible for a person with a Hotmail account to receive mail in English, copy it onto one's hard disk, make insertions and modifications to that same mail, and send it to someone else who has, say, a usa.net mail. This is generally not possible with Indian language fonts.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has approved of ISCII, supposed to be a standard code which software developers are recommended to use as base for their fonts. Many software developers have written converters for this, by which it is possible to convert fonts from one Indian language to another, and so on. This ISCII works with DOS, say software developers, but does not quite work with the more widely used Windows, for which there is another code called ISFOC.

The problem with ISFOC, says Harsh Kumar, Adviser, IT, at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd, is that the matching of characters with the keyboard is not intuitive. (In intuitive matching, the key `k' would stand for the sound `ka' and so on). So another programme has to be bought from C-DAC and kept running to make the use of the standard possible.

This is one other reason why software developers are coming up with their own proprietary fonts. ``Their aim is to either develop their own codes so that they can sell their own software to allow their own fonts to run, thus making money by selling both the font and the software. Or they try to develop a code which allows one to do away with having to use the common code and having to buy C-DAC's enabling software,'' says an Indian languages software developer at a well-known portal company.

The result is that there is complete chaos in the matter of the use of Indian fonts, he says. ``Firstly, people must offer standards which do not require any other software programme to be running. The idea is to simplify matters for the use of Indian languages on computers.

Secondly, people must stop trying to make money out of fonts and instead sell language applications and solutions. This is what will get more people to use language software.''

The other matter, he says, is that this scattered use of varied fonts and standards leaves the field free for giants such as Microsoft, whose Windows 2000 already enables the use of Hindi and which uses a common international standard for the languages. ``Because of Microsoft's widespread use that might become the standard. This is expensive for the Indian user who might settle for this only because his own country's font developers cannot get together and decide to move in a particular direction.''

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