Hi Venantius, It is rather astounding that the Official Language Department of the Government of Goa is not promoting the use of Devnagri software for writing Konkani in the officially accepted script Devnagri.The business of Devnagri software has been interesting me for long because in school, my teachers used to hand write the stencils for the examination paper. There were concerns of legibility, waste of stationery etc. So I purchased Devnagri software for my school. I am happy to say that with this, the question papers were more clear and there was a minimum waste of stationery and fewer requests from students for help in reading the question papers. The side effect was that the language teachers (Hindi, Marathi and Konkani) all learnt to computer type their papers. This induced others to learn to use the computer and that in turn led to them using the computer for generating mark sheets, attendance sheets and all kinds of work finally culminating in Power Point presentations.
Though it sounds impressive to be able to type Devnagri, most of the software packages available have an Anglicized keyboard. One merely types phonetically. For instance, with the 'Hindi Pad' software, (available for around Rs. 355/- couriered home to you) to type 'BHARAT' in Devnagri, one has only to type b, h, a, a, r, a, a, t, a. The extra a in each case is because the letters appear as half letters - this is a peculiarity of this particular software. after a while one gets used to it. There is also other software available. I suggested this particular one because it is inexpensive. Linux has in built language support as also Microsoft Windows. There are also many websites which give you online Devnagri transliteration online. You can type in English much as I have shown you and you can cut and paste the result in a word processor page provided you have that particular font. Here is a website: http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic -- \\\ = \\-00 Tony de Sa C u [email protected] \ ~/ M : +91 9975 162 897 --|><| Ph. : +91 832 2470 148 = / | ^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v
