Why language fonts?

Only 3 percent of the Indian population can speak in English while close to 40 percent of the Indian population speaks Hindi or one of its variants. Still, the medium of communication in higher education, judiciary, bureaucracy, and the corporate sector is English. Since English is the medium of interaction in IT systems too, structurally, such a situation aggravates the divide between segments of population that have access to computing and the ones that don't. To arrest this situation, an important step has come from the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in the form of The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL).

TDIL has been mandated to bridge the digital divide by developing IT tools in local languages in India.Since 1991, TDIL has sponsored research in developing Indian language computing resources, processing systems, tools and translation support systems and localization of software for Indian languages. The other key initiatives have come in from development of Human-Machine Interface Systems and development of web centric applications. TDIL operates on a distributed innovation model through collaborations with 13 resource centers across India. Some of the notable milestones have come through CDAC, a collaborative partner of TDIL in form of GIST (Graphics and Intelligence-based Script) that has brought diverse users to employ local language IT tools. Applications have ranged from desktop publishing to sub-titles in TV broadcast in various Indian languages. A Local Language word processor, ‘LEAP' has brought desktop publishing to a large segment of population in a language they can communicate in naturally.

Windows
How you should access these foreign language fonts will depend on the extent to which you will need the special characters in your applications. These changes will allow you to use the foreign character fonts in Windows applications.

Use the Windows Character Map for typing languages with few or infrequent non-Latin characters, or if you need a few characters now and then or just need to type a few foreign words within your text. Via the Character Map you can access any available foreign language fonts in any application. Select Start menu > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. From here you change fonts, examine all available characters in each font, and add individual characters to a text.

Change your keybard settings if you need to do extensive typing in the foreign language. To do this, select Start menu > Settings > Control Panel. Depending on your version of Windows, you may have to choose either Keyboard or Regional and Language Settings. When the dialog box opens, select the Language tab, click on Details, then Add, and then select the language. When you Apply these settings, your taskbar will display the 2-letter code for the current language settings. You may toggle between keyboard settings by clicking on this code in the taskbar. Turn on the On-Screen Keyboard to learn where characters are located on the foreign language keyboard. To locate this virtual keyboard, select Start menu > Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > On-Screen Keyboard. For languages you use frequently that use non-Latin alphabets, it might be useful to buy stickers to put on your keyboard.

Mac

Macintosh OS X comes with foreign language utilities pre-installed, but they must first be activated. To do this, select Apple menu > System Preferences > International > Keyboard or Input Menu, then select the keyboard layouts you'd like to activate. To access these keyboards, open International System Preferences and check Keyboard Viewer.Within applications, a flag icon will appear in the upper right corner of the screen; click on this icon to switch keyboard options.

The Macintosh OS 9 CD contains Language Kits that can be intalled onto the system. Insert the CD into the drive, click Mac OS Install. Navigate through the process until you reach the Add/Remove button, and click on it to reach the Custom Installation and Removal window. Check the box next to Language Options, and select Customized Installation from the dropdown menu. When the Select Language Kits window opens, check each software kit you want to install, then click OK. After installation is complete, you will need to restart your system.

To type in the foreign language, you will need to switch keyboards. First enter the application you plan to use. Click on the flag in the upper right corner, then use the dropdown menu to choose a script. If you don't see the languages you just installed, you may need to make them available in the Keyboard menu. Do so by going to the Apple menu icon in the upper left corner of the screen. Choose Control Panels > Keyboard. Click on each language you'd like to activate.

Language fonts for Mobile Devices

If you look at the mobile VAS industry, rural services stand to constitute the major pie of VAS in the coming years [read this report on Mobile VAS in India]

Airtel has big plans to penetrate deep into rural India and the first step to do that is by offering handsets with regional fonts.

IKSL’s ‘Grameena Mobile Kranthi’ campaign (IKSL, i.e. IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd is a JV between IFFCO and Airtel) is aimed at penetrating deeper into the Karnataka state’s rural market plans to make mobile telephony more accessible and affordable for rural consumers. Subscribers to the service will get five free voice messages including agriculture market information over the mobile handset [via]

The keyboard will enable subscribers to send text messages in Kannada as well (do other handsets support UTF?)

Regional language keyboards can bring whole lot of VAS monetization options in the rural areas and will be a classic "BoP" story.

Where can I use the language fonts?

How does my business grow using language fonts?

Does Microsoft, Linix, or Macintosh support the language fonts?

About TrueType

The TrueType digital font format was originally designed by Apple Computer, Inc. It was a means of avoiding per-font royalty payments to the owners of other font technologies, and a solution to some of the technical limitations of Adobe's Type 1 format.

Originally code named "Bass" (because these were scalable fonts and you can scale a fish), and later "Royal", the TrueType format was designed to be efficient in storage and processing, and extensible. It was also built to allow the use of hinting approaches already in use in the font industry as well as the development of new hinting techniques, enabling the easy conversion of already existing fonts to the TrueType format. This degree of flexibility in TrueType's implementation of hinting makes it extremely powerful when designing characters for display on the screen. Microsoft had also been looking for an outline format to solve similar problems, and Apple agreed to license TrueType to Microsoft.

Apple included full TrueType support in its Macintosh operating system, System 7, in May 1991. Its more recent development efforts include TrueType GX, which extends the TrueType format as part of the new graphics architecture QuickDraw GX for the MacOS. TrueType GX includes some Apple-only extensions to the font format, supporting Style Variations and the Line Layout Manager.

Microsoft first included TrueType in Windows 3.1, in April 1992. Soon afterwards, Microsoft began rewriting the TrueType rasterizer to improve its efficiency and performance and remove some bugs (while maintaining compatibility with the earlier version). The new TrueType rasterizer, version 1.5, first shipped in Windows NT 3.1. There have since been some minor revisions, and the version in Windows 95 and NT 3.51 is version 1.66. The new capabilities include enhanced features such as font smoothing (or more technically, grayscale rasterization).

Microsoft's ongoing development effort includes the TrueType Open specification. TrueType Open will work on any Microsoft platform and Apple Macintosh machine, and includes features to allow multi-lingual typesetting and fine typographic control.

The next extension to the TrueType Open format is to be TrueType Open version 2, a collaborative effort with Adobe Systems to produce a format capable of containing both TrueType (and Open) and PostScript data.