The real solution

[Arjun Aggarwal]

Hi Everybody   I am writing this letter as an extension to my earlier ones.   This time i will raise the old issue with a new perspective and with more practicality. The Unicode encoding is meant to help people around the world to use characters in their own language besides English. But , unfortunately this is not the case for Hindi , the third largest spoken language of the world( spoken in around 10 countries). This is so because the Unicode encoding for the Devnagari script has failed to do just this. The script that is used for writing this language , i.e. Hindi and around 8 other languages.   Here i am not concerned about the font developers (no offence intended) but the people who want to use it for everyday purposes. This is the reason why you will not have seen any Hindi web pages and other applications written in Unicode or using Unicode code mappings(except a few test pages by some enterprising individuals ).On the contrary i have seen thousands os applications and web pages using Unicode for Chinese and Japanese inspite of these language scripts requiring large use of the Unicode encoding space.Is this some kind of conspiracy to keep the use of Indic scripts from the Unicode system to the minimal. This is because the Unicode system does not provide means and ways to display and even more importantly store characters for Devnagari in the way they should be(and the way in which they are used). And as the issue of transliteration was raised by many members of this list , i would like to say that it is not difficult to build an engine for the same using half characters.This misconception is based on the fact that the iSCII syatem has been used for building Unicode for Devnagari and other Indic scripts.ISCII is not at all a perfect system.The reservation that a non-ISCII system will not be able to transliterate is highly ill gotten.Nothing can be further from the truth. The people want a script system that they can use for every purpose ( displaying , encoding new fonts, databases and every other purpose under the sun) and not just for displaying characters (which unfortunately is left to the mercy of the OS manufacturers) , even this function of it being not used properly. I am not trying to degrade the people that built up the Unicode system .What i am trying to say here is that the system used presently is highly out of sync with what it should be. Anybody wanting to see extensive usage of the Unicode standard for Devnagari ,  will have to help me put it in a way that is actually  needed and is very much different from the ISCII form that is being used today. If anybody wants to see how the Devnagari encoding of Unicode should actually look like , they can visit http://www.bharatbhasha.com and download a font named Shusha .If they are not able to do this they can send me a private e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and i will send them the font file for Windows in an attachment. The above mentioned mentioned font has not been developed by me and therefore should not be confused as a promotion through this forum.   With Regards Arjun Aggarwal [EMAIL PROTECTED]