Sanskrit software tools, fonts CD now available!

Tirupati, Nov 26: The Department of Information and Technology (DIT) has released a compilation of Sanskrit language software tools and fonts CD, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(CDAC) for free public usage, at Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha (RSVP) here.

DIT Joint Secretary and Financial Advisor E K Bharat Bhushan, speaking on the occasion yesterday, said the DIT has initiated the Technology Development for Indian languages (TDIL) with the objective of developing information procesing tools and techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier, creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services.

As part of a national initiative and to proliferate the use of Indian languages in Information Technology, software tools and fonts for Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati, have already been released by the DIT, Mr Bhushan, who is actively involved in the development and proliferation of language technologies, said.

CDAC Director-General S Ramakrishna, commenting on the release said, ''the unique multilingual nature of India poses a great challenge and opportunity as the country moves to adopt it in a big way. Making IT available in local languages is imperative to ensure that benefit of this revolution reaches the common man.'' Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) Director Swarna Lata, who is involved in various areas of language technology, including consortium projects like development of English-Hindi Machine Translation system said Sanskrit language is both classical and sacred to all and recognised as one of the 22 official languages of India.

RSVP Vice Chancellor Harekrishna Satapathy shared his views with experts on the occasion.

Later, a power-point presentation was jointly made by the New Delhi-based Jawaharlal University Prof G N Jha and Mr Chandrakant from CDAC, explaining the advantages and mode of the software usage.

UNI