Tech related

One of the main impediment for non usage of Unicode for Indian language is the lack of support for Indic opentype fonts in almost all graphics and DTP packages. The usage Indian languages in computers started from DTP (desktop publishing). Even now, almost 85% Indic usage on computers is in the area of DTP and related fields like graphics, presentations, web-sites, etc. Most of them still use old non-Unicode hacked font based technologies. Take any graphics and page making software in the market like Adobe PageMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, CorelDraw, Quark, etc. - all of these do not render Indic opentype fonts. And this is the main reason why Indic Unicode is not popular in India.

I have talked about LIPs earlier. They were referring to Windows XP. The hitch with those LIPs was that you can not toggle between Hindi and English. This problem is solved with Hindi LIP for Vista. It is available for download at Microsoft web-site. Click here for detials. I have given below some screenshots-

Recently I got a new laptop -HP Compaq nx6325. I partitioned the hard disk into three -C, E and F. I installed Windows XP SP2 in C and Windows Vista in E. Next was Office suite. I installed Office 2003 in C in the XP partition and Office 2007 in E in the Vista partition. I put the Outlook .PST file in F drive. Now I configured Outlook 2003 (part of Office 2003) and Outlook 2007 (part of Office 2007) to use the same .PST file. Surprisingly, both are working fine. Now I can work in XP or Vista and use my mailbox without any problem. I am thrilled.

People always tend to compare Google with Microsoft and pronounce that Google's technologies are always superior to that of Microsoft's. For instance, the comparison of the results from Google's search with that of search.msn.com (by Microsoft). But I have a different story to tell. A fellow MVP, Veer Ji Wangoo, pointed me at local.live.com from Microsoft. I opened it and tried to search some driving directions in Karnataka, India. I searched for the driving directions from Bangalore, India to some small towns like Subrahmanya, Tirthahalli, Karkala, etc. And lo, it gave the directions perfectly. Of course, it is not able to provide the directions for smaller towns and villages. I tried the same thing in local.google.com. It failed miserably. There is no India specific web-site from Google like local.google.co.in. The award goes to Microsoft.