A: Surprisingly the answer is YES. Many people are not aware of this little feature built into Microsoft Word 2003. The steps are like this –
1. Save the document from Word as a text document and select ISCII Kannada encoding

2. Open the saved text document again using Word 2003 and select ISCII Hindi as the encoding.

That’s all one has to do. The trick employs the fact that the ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) encoding for Indic is the same across all Indian languages. That means the ISCII code for Kannada “ka” and Hindi “ka” are the same. Thus the ISCII text document for Kannada and Hindi will be the same. In this example of transliteration, what we are doing is converting the Kannada Unicode document into ISCII document and then converting it back into Unicode. While doing so we are not converting it back into Kannada Unicode, but into Hindi Unicode encoding. This does the trick.

The post Transliterating from Kannada into Hindi first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: The Bhasha India IME will add additional keyboard layouts also known as Input Method Editor (IME) only. They will not add the Indian language capabilities into Windows XP. This is done by enabling Indic in Windows XP. Please read the tutorial at [http://vishvakannada.com/node/48|http://vishvakannada.com/node/48]. This process will enable Indian languages on Windows XP. After this step one needs to add the Kannada or other Indic keyboard layouts. This is described at the same page. Once these steps have been done, only then the Bhasha India IME has to be installed and added under the keyboard layout/IME.

The post How do I enable Indic on Windows XP? first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: The answer is big NO. Just by copying the opentype font into the device will make to display the text shown without the proper rendering (glyph substitution, glyph positioning etc. are not done). WinCE 5.0 itself has introduced the fecility to have internationalization including the rendering of opentype fonts. I had built a mobile device platform using the WinCE 5.0 SDK long ago. I also developed a multilingual notepad -English, Hindi and Kannada – employing Visual Studio .NET Compact Framework, way back in 2004 itself. But none of the devices available in the market allow me to replace their OS by the one built by me. They neither include the components required for rendering the opentype font also. I have sent emails to HTC, the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile devices requesting them to include these compnents. My email was not replied at all. I have repeatedly requested Microsoft India to take up the issue with device manufacturers like HP, HTC, etc. They also did not bother. This is the situation.

From the user group groups.msn.com/MicrosoftVOLTuserscommunity (registration required)

Please also read the blog of Michael Kaplan at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/05/19/420145.aspx on the same subject.

The post Indic on Windows mobile and PDAs first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A. Windows XP does not have support for Oriya. That has been included in Windows Vista. The opentype font used for Oriya is called Kalinga. Vista has the Oriya locale also. One can have date, time, currency in Oriya. One can also have the files with names typed in Oriya. Windows explorer will properly sort the files as per Oriya sorting order. Shown below are two screenshots -one from Notepad and another from Word 2007.

The post Oriya in Windows first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: There is a special character in Unicode called ZWNJ (Zero Width Non Joiner). Using this in between the last consonant ending with a halant (pure consonant or dead consonant) and before the next consonant will solve this issue. Select the built-in Kannada keyboard layout and press Ctrl-Shift-2 to enter ZWNJ. In the present example, after typing ಬಿಲ್ but before typing ಗಳನ್ನು, hold down Ctrl and Shift and press 2. You will get ಬಿಲ್‌ಗಳನ್ನು as you wanted.

If you are using the Kannada Indic IME1, then select the KGP (Karnataka Govt Prescribed) layout. Typing ‘f’ key twice will introduce the ZWNJ, ie., after entering ಬಿಲ type the ‘f’ key twice and then enter ಗಳನ್ನು.

The post Preventing unwanted vattus in Kannada first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: Whenever you see question mark that means that the application does not understand what is the encoding used. In Excel instead of simply pasting the text, use the paste special option from the Edit menu. In the dialog box select Unicode text.

The post Pasting Unicode text into Excel first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: Nicholas Shanks Has put up a detailed [http://web.nickshanks.com/typography/kannada/|page] on the topic. Please visit that. Kannadigas should be thankful to Nicholas Shanks for this.

Arun Sharma reports a bug in Firefox’s rendering of Kannada on Mac OS at this page.

Here is a screenshot of Vishva Kannada in Safari browser on Mac, sent by Nicholas Shanks-

And shown below is the part screen capture of Vishva Kannada in Firefox on Mac, sent by Nicholas Shanks-

Thanks once again to Nicholas Shanks.

The post Kannada on Mac OS first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: Since you already have Win XP, you need not use Baraha for typing in Kannada Unicode. Win XP has built-in keyboard layout for Kannada. You need to just enable that. Please read the tutorials on enabling and typing in Indian languages. The method is the same for Kannada. The built-in keyboard layout of Win XP is Inscript. If you want to use additional layouts, you can download the IME from BhashaIndia web-site. This IME will give you KGP (Karnataka Govt Prescribed), typewriter and English transliteration layouts. The last two are similar to what you get in Baraha. If you want you can also use Baraha Direct in Unicode mode. Next question is how to send email in Kannada Unicode. Use IE6. Set UTF-8 for encoding under View > Encoding. Select the Kannada keyboard layout and type in Kannada in Gmail or Yahoo. Send your email. The recipient must have Unicode enabled system to read your mail in Kannada. Gmail supports Kannada text in subject line also.

The post Sending email in Kannada Unicode first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: Yes. Provided you use Unicode and save the file in Unicode encoding. If you use Word for typing, better to save it as plain text or RTF file. If you save as plain text, you will lose all formatting. RTF will retain most of the formattings other than Word specific features like WordArt. If you have OpenOffice installed in the Linux system, it can open Word documents.

The post Kannada in Windows and Linux first appeared on Vishva Kannada.

A: Windows 2000 supported Devanagari and Tamil scripts. Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Konkani use Devanagari script. Windows XP added Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati and Punjabi. SP2 for XP added Malayalam and Bengali. Urdu is also available. Recently Nepali has been given separately for download. Oriya and Assamese are yet to be added.

The post Languages supported by Windows first appeared on Vishva Kannada.