DIT launches software tools, fonts in 7 languages

New Delhi, Jan 24 (UNI) In a major initiative to link people through Indian language technology, the Department of Information and Technology (DIT), today launched free software tools and fonts for Assamese, Kannada, Malyalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu for free distribution to the public.

''The department is working with private partners to bring out more new products including Indian language web browsers,'' Communication and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran said.

It will enable people translate any site of their choice in their mother language while browsing a website, he added.

''Moreover, we are working in the direction of educational softwares for grade V onwards for state boards and CBSE,'' Mr Maran added.

There are 23 institutions which are already working with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) for creating new softwares.

The development and consolidation of the software tools and fonts for the remaining 12 official languages is in progress.

Bangla and Gujarati software tools and fonts will be ready for release in the next three months and the remaining nine languages by this year end, he said.

Earlier, Home Minister Shivraj Patil stressed on developing more laboratories and institutes where research and development (R&D) may be done in a proper way. The next focus is on speech to text and machine translation, he said.

Union minister of state for Commerce Jairam Ramesh urged the IT Minister to ensure a low cost PC to be made available in the market to avail the facilities of free software tools.

''In 2007, we must expect that we may crack the Rs 8,000 price PC,'' Mr Ramesh said.

Keeping in view the far-reaching initiative of the DIT, as also to bring about language computing technology revolution in the country, so far three CDs in Tamil, Hindi and Telugu were released earlier by the department.

These language tools and fonts are also being made available on website: www.ildc.in and www.ildc.gov.in for free downloads online by the net surfers.

The CDs contain true type fonts with keyboard driver, multi-font keyboard engine for true type fonts, Unicode compliant open type fonts, Unicode compliant keyboard driver, generic fonts code and storage code converter, localised version of BharateeyaOO, English version of BharateeyaOO, Spellchecker, bilingual dictionary, transliteration tool and language tutor package.

All these language CDs released now, as also the ones released earlier, have been developed/consolidated by CDAC.

In this initiative, CDAC has joined-hands with a number of public (academia, R&D labs) and private industries under DIT.

UNI