Content Development in Indian Languages Current Status , Available Tools and Future Trends

1
Content Development in Indian Languages -
Current Status , Available Tools and Future
Trends

• Pramod R ltpramod_at_mahiti.orggt

2
Scope of the Talk

• Current Status of content development in Indian
  languages
• Role of Unicode
• Why Linux?
• Possible Server Client side Issues
• Demos

3
The Worry

• While creating a web Site in English, one does
  not worry about the following
• How data is stored (encoding), fonts (their
  encoding, whether they are adhere to open
  standards or not), input methods
• Whether the end user has the infrastructure to
  view and contribute to the site in English
• Content development in Indian Languages
• involves worrying about such things
• will be easier and accessible if such basic
  Infrastructure (fonts, encoding, input,display)
  are taken care of
• easier when Standards are established for taking
  care of such basic Infrastructure

4
The Good News

• Established standards and methods
  (infrastructure) that aid this goal are already
  in place
• Unicode for encoding is a widely accepted
  standard
• OpenType Fonts for display and Inscript and
  Itrans (Phonetic) methods for Input are accepted
  methods
• The net effect of these Standards
• Operating systems and applications are adopting
  or will be forced to adopt these standards
• Content developers need not worry about these
  infrastructural issues anymore
• Developing content in Indian languages is as easy
  as doing the same in English

5
Role of Unicode

• Definition
• Universal character set supporting most written
  scripts including all Indian Scripts
• Advantages
• One Standard to encode Indian Languages
• Simple design makes importing to and from other
  encoding easier
• Input Methods, Rendering Mechanism, Search and
  Sort Methods are more flexible and independent
• Reduced Vendor Dependence

6
The net result

• These things will be a thing of the Past
• Handling of Display, Input and Data-Storage that
  are taken care of by the Program and not the OS
• Support for Platforms Functionality that are
  entirely vendor driven
• Input Methods (Phonetic, Keyboard), available
  fonts, and sort functionality that tightly
  integrated with the Program
• Little or no flexibility in buying or using
  third-party fonts, Input Methods and Programs

7
Drawbacks in adopting Unicode

• Support for Unicode alone is not enough for
  supporting Indian Languages
• requires support for rendering OpenType
  Fonts(OTF) or an alternate Mechanism
• Older Operating Systems do not have this by
  default
• Out of the box Indian language support is growing
  but yet to mature in all aspects
• Phonetic Keymaps may not be included in all OS's
• Number of OTF's are comparatively lesser than
  TTF's

8
Client Side Issues in an Intranet or Focused Group

• Determine support for Indian language(s) in
  platform used by target audience
• If not supported, does it require
• an upgrade of the component,
• an upgrade of the Operating System
• migration to another Operating System
• In case of 2 3, determine feasibility based on
  Upgrade Costs vs. Costs involved in using a
  legacy system
• Using non-standard methods leads to slower
  implementation time
• Dependence on Single Vendor
• Reduced Scalability

9
Client Side Issues with regard to the Internet

• Determine support for Indian language(s) on major
  Platforms
• If you cannot use Unicode for a really good
  reason
• Try to limit it to the Client Side
• Use ISCII to ease conversion
• Use font encoding but really, as a last resort
• Use an existing font encoding standard which is
  easier to import to Unicode

10
Issues to take care of while developing content
Server Side

• Use Unicode
• Will ease migration on the client side in the
  future
• Search and Sort functionalities are easier to
  provide
• Easier to convert to and from any encoding
• Most Databases support Unicode out of the box
• Easier to manage
• can afford to use complex Content Management
  Systems
• Language Negotiation
• Definition

11
Why Choose Linux for your Content Development
Needs?

• Support for Indian Languages is maturing or
  present in
• Desktop Environments - KDE, Gnome and XFCE
• Toolkits - GTK and QT
• Office Suites Koffice, OpenOffice, Gnome Office
• Printing - Supported by QT and OpenOffice
• Web Browsers Konqueror, Devanagari support in
  Mozilla
• Extensive Unicode Support
• Availability of Good Editing tools, Content
  Management Systems and Databases

12
Why Choose Linux for your Content Development
Needs? (Contd)

• Extensive Internationalization
• Definition
• Allows content to be localized without much
  effort or altering the Software itself
• Most applications support translations of their
  User Interface using Gettext or a similar
  mechanisms
• Active Community involved in Internationalization
  efforts
• opensource software is more likely to be
  internationalized given a wider and diverse user
  base
• Active translation community means translation
  efforts could be shared

13
Demos

• We will start with the humble Text Editor
• Create a simple text file
• Print it to a PDF File
• Create a simple web page
• Publish this text file to a blog
• Moving on to a Powerful Office Suite
• Use the Word Processor for creating a Document

14
Using the Plone Content Management System

• Plone
• Opensource content management system built on top
  of the Zope application server
• Out of the box features include
• User registration
• Ability to add Content of type files, Images,
  Documents, news items
• Configurable Workflow
• Extensible
• through freely available products
• Active work on internationalization

15
Internationalization features in plone

• Internationalization support through products
• Placeless Translation Service
• for reading compiled Message catalogs
• I18N Layer
• for handling multi-lingual content
• Plone Language Tool
• enables end-user to set the Portal's language
• Older Method of Translation
• CMFLocalizer, Localizer and Translation Service

16
Other tools that support Indian languages

• PHP
• BabelKit
• Toolkit Sites using PHP or Perl to maintain for
  multi-lingual database's
• Databases that support Unicode
• MySQL 4.1 upwards
• PostgreSQL 7.1and upwards