Giving every Telugu-speaking person across the world a reason to cheer , the State government and Silicon Andhra launched 15 Unicode-compatible Telugu fonts, apart from a Telugu spell checker and bilingual dictionaries, at the Second International Telugu Internet Conference here on Friday.
In other words, anyone who wants to write in Telugu on the computer can do so without having to install any special software or fonts. Text using these fonts would be readable by any computer in the world using any operating system.
The project called Telugu Vijayam (www.teluguvijayam.com) has resources for the promotion of use of Telugu on the computers and Internet. Keeping with the spirit of ‘Vijayam’, the fonts have been named Sri Krishnadevaraya, Gidugu, Dhurjati, Suranna, Peddanna, and Suravaram, among others to honour household names in Telugu.
Availability of such fonts would go a long way in increasing the use of Telugu as an official language, Chairman of AP Official Languages Commission Mandali Buddha Prasad said.
Earlier, employees and officials would point out that they did not have the tools to use Telugu in official correspondence but now they would not be able offer any such excuses, he added.
Apart from the fonts, resources such as Telugu spell checker, bilingual dictionaries, thesaurus and Telugu Keyboard were also launched at the three-day conference that began at GITAM University. The project aims at converting knowledge of Telugu into an employment opportunity, president of Silicon Andhra Anand Kuchibotla explained.
Urging promoters of the movement to not lose hope, Tamil Nadu Governor K. Rosaiah said that adoption of technology will take time. The movement is gaining strength and is enabling many more Telugu speaking people to respect their mother tongue, he added.
The importance of the government-sponsored project is that it enables a larger number of people to use computers and also access information available on the internet.
Even those who do not know English can read the information on a computer, Minister for Information Technology and Communication Ponnala Lakshmaiah said.
The development of spell checker and other tools were based on the computational linguistic efforts of professor in Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies in University of Hyderabad G. Uma Maheswar Rao and professor in IIT Peri Bhaskar Rao, former Member of Parliament Yarlagadda Lakshmi Prasad said.
Chairman of AP Legislative Council A. Chakrapani, Minister for Tourism Vatti Vasant Kumar, secretary IT Sanjay Jaju were present.
