Posts published in “FAQs”

Q: Is it possible to transliterate from Kannada into Hindi? I have the data in Microsoft Word 2003 doc file.

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 -

Q: I downloaded and installed the Kannada IME from Bhasha India web-site. Still I don't get Kannada properly in Windows XP. I see blank squares when I type using the Kannada IME. Why?

A: The Bhasha India IME will add additional keyboard layouts also known as Input Method Editor (IME) only.

Q: I tyied to copy a opentype font into the windows mobile, and it can not show the characters corrently. Is there any solution such as "ups10.dll", a special dll for windows mobile?

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.

Q. How can I get Oriya in Windows?

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.

Q: How can I prevent the next consonant from not becoming a vattu for the previous consonant? For ex, I do not want ಬಿಲ್ and ಗಳನ್ನು join and form ಬಿಲ್ಗಳನ್ನು. But I do not want a space in between also.

Q: I was trying to copy and paste Kannada text from a web-site into Excel 2003 spreadsheet. The data is generated using a VS.NET 2003 application in the form of a grid. But the data when pasted appeared as question marks. How to solve this problem?

Q: I want to use Kannada employing Unicode in Mac OS. How do I do?

A: Nicholas Shanks Has put up a detailed page on the topic. Please visit that. Kannadigas should be thankful to Nicholas Shanks for this.

Q: I have Win XP and Office 2003. Please tell me how do I send email in Kannada Unicode using Gmail or Yahoo employing Baraha?

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.

Q: If I type in Kannada using Windows XP, can I open the file in Linux?

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.

Q: What are the languages supported by Windows?

A: Windows 2000 supported Devanagari and Tamil scripts. Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Konkani use Devanagari script. Windows XP added Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati and Punjabi.