K.P. Rao, known for his contribution towards the development of Kannada keyboard and a software to use the language on computer, has developed a new programme (intelligent font) to read Devanagari content in Kannada on the Internet without changing the code.
Mr. Rao told presspersons here on Thursday that he and his granddaughter Aditi Baglodi had developed two programmes that would make possible to read a text available on the Internet in Devanagari script, may be in Konkani or Sanskrit, in Kannada without affecting or changing the code.
“This has been implemented in two Devanagari fonts — ‘Devam’ for reading in Kannada and ‘V-Aditi’ for reading in phonetic transliteration scheme used by Indologist Rev. Ferdinand Kittel (1832-1903),” he said.
“This programme will allow an access to the literature and cultural content of the minor language community by all people who are accustomed to reading in any specific script,” he said.
While Mr. Rao has developed the Devam font, Ms. Baglodi has developed the V-Aditi font. These two fonts would be available on the Internet shortly.
Ms. Baglodi is a final year BE (Computer Science) student at SMV Institute of Technology and Management at Bantakal in Udupi district. Mr. Rao said that language was usually script independent. This was seen in languages such as Konkani, Tulu and Kodava, which do not have a specified script of their own and may be written in Kannada, Devanagari or Malayalam.
“In the coastal Karnataka region, there are a few minor languages which when written use many scripts. Technically this is not a new problem as many Indian languages are written in multiple scripts. The best example would be Sanskrit in Devanagari, Kannada, Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam or any other Indic script. This is possible because all these scripts are capable of representing almost all the sounds available in Sanskrit,” he said.
However, reading the same text written in one script requires total knowledge and familiarity of the script though the content remains the same.
For instance, a Konkani article written in Kannada script cannot be read by a person without the knowledge of the script.
Devanagari Unicode set has now been enhanced and there is a provision to represent all special sounds of Indian languages,Mr. Rao said.
Veteran journalist M.V. Kamath launched the two intelligent fonts here. Mr. Rao and Ms. Bagalodi demonstrated the working of Devam and V-Aditi fonts.