I made a presentation demonstrating Dual-script Singhala at National Science Foundation of Sri Lanka. Most of the attendees were government employees and media representatives; a few private citizens came too.
Dual-script Singhala means romanized Singhala that can be displayed either in the Latin script or in the Singhala script using an Orthographic Smart Font. It is easy to input (phonetically) using a keyboard layout slightly altered from QWERTY. The font uses Standard Ligature feature <liga> of OpenType / OpenFont standard to display glyphs of Sanskrit ligatures as well as many Singhala letters. The font is supported across all OSs: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iOS and Android. Dual-script Singhala is the proper and complete solution on the computer for the Singhala script used to write Singhala, Sanskrit and Pali languages. The same solution can be applied for all Indic languages. The government ministries, media and people welcomed it with enthusiasm and relief that there is something practical for Singhala. The response in the country was singularly positive, except for the person that filibustered the Q&A session of the presentation that spoke about the hard work done on Unicode Sinhala, clearly outside the subject matter of the presentation. The result of the survey passed around was 100% as below (translated from Singhala): 1. I believe that Dual-script Singhala is convenient to me as it is implemented similar to English - Yes 2. Today everyone uses Unicode Sinhala. It is easy and has no problems - No 3. The cost of Unicode Sinhala should be eliminated by switching to Dual-scrip Singhala - Yes 4. We should amend Pali text in the Tripitaka according to rulings of SLS1134 - No 5. Digitizing old books is a very important thing - Yes 6. We should focus on making this easy-to-use Dual-script Singhala method a standard - Yes Please comment or send questions.
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