Gora, if you are going to edit the doc, the following might help: Nudi (pronounced phonetically - i mean u as in underwear not as in unicorn, i as in e) is a movement by Kannada activists from 2002. A search of "nudi kgp 2002" could result in a blast from the past.
http://www.businessline.in/2002/04/08/stories/2002040801201300.htm Also Karnataka government website http://www.karnataka.gov.in/kannada.html has a document dated 2003 on how to make new fonts. d On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Gora Mohanty<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:59:05 +0530 > vinay ವಿನಯ್ <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Dear All, >> >> One of the key goals of FOSSCOMM was to be able to write to >> various departments/agencies relating to adoption of FOSS and to >> engage with the department and persuade them to adopt FOSS. >> >> One of the fundamental issues in Karnataka is that the 'official' >> font of the Government - Nudi, does not work (well) on GNU/Linux. >> This is preventing government departments/agencies from adopting >> FOSS. > > How is this an official font? Why the quotes around "official"? > Firstly, we should now be promoting Unicode-encoded fonts, and > pushing for 8-bit fonts not to be used and certainly not in > the capacity of an "official font for a language", whatever > that means. Although it does make sense for the government to > standardise on one font, the idea of mandating one official font > dates back to pre-Unicode days, and now is usually an excuse to > ensure lock-in to that font. > http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/IndicFontsList#Kannada > lists several fonts, but I do not know Kannada enough to be > able to evaluate the completeness, or suitability of each. > Several of them are free in the true sense of the word, and > we should ask that the government use them as a starting point. > Our position should be that the production of several libre, > high-quality fonts in any given Indian language should be > a publicly-funded exercise. > >> We have drafted a letter for the e-Governance secretary of the >> Govt of Karnataka, discussing the issues relating to Nudi and >> requesting that they address the issue . > >> As a consequence of our Bangalore FOSSCOMM meeting, some of the >> Bangalore organizations are already working on the technical >> aspects of Nudi, this letter is to get the government also into >> this process and own up/complement work done by the FOSS >> community. > > The letter is a little confusing, as it says not fully Unicode > compliant, whereas from other statements in the annexure, it > seems that the font is completely non-compliant with Unicode. > It is also not correct to say that the font is ASCII-encoded. > Rather, from what I understand from the letter, the font > follows some non-standardised encoding that is guaranteed to > break on Unicode-compliant platforms. > > We should make a big deal about ensuring that the font follows > open standards (Unicode in this case), and is available under an > open licence. What is Unicode, and why it is important needs to > be brought out more clearly. I will put in some time tonight to > redraft this letter. I think this can be an important tool in > pushing for the actual adoption of the government of India policy > on FOSS in e-governance. > _______________________________________________ > network mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in > _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
