Gora Mohanty 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"?
This is the official in the sense that all government offices use this
software only and refuse to accept any other Kannada Input Method. But
yes, I do not know for sure if any government order was issued mandating
it. In practice though everyone uses only Nudi, and will refuse to use a
OS which does not support Nudi.
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.
Absolutely. We want to push for unicode-encoded fonts only which is why
we have asked them to make the software fully unicode compliant. As to
whether the government should promote only one font or more than font, I
guess it does not make sense to promote only font. So, now in the
letter, should we explicitly demand multiple official fonts?
Our position should be that the production of several libre,
high-quality fonts in any given Indian language should be
a publicly-funded exercise.
Agree. The demand for public investment to create several high-quality
fonts should be added .
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.
Well, the thing is the software has some features where you can conver
the text to unicode. But the thing is, after you convert it to unicode,
you cannot even edit is using the same software. But since they do allow
conversion to unicode, if we say "software does not comply to Unicode at
all", they might say its not true.
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.
did'nt understand this. But can call you off-line to understand better.
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.
Agree
I will put in some time tonight to
redraft this letter.
That will be great. Thanks a lot Gora!
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.
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--
Vinay Sreenivasa
IT for Change
91-98805-95032
[email protected]
http://itforchange.net
http://public-software.in
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