C-DAC: Press Kit - Press Releases - Tamil Software Tools & Fonts Released

Chennai, April 15, 2005

The Department of Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MC&IT), Government of India has taken another key step towards the implementation of Indian languages on computers with the release of a complete set of Tamil software tools and fonts on a CD at a function organized at the Park Sheraton, Chennai today.

The CD contains tools developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chennai Kavigal Technologies, Learn Fun Systems, Palaniappa Brothers, Cadgraf Digitals Pvt. Ltd, Modular Systems and AU-KBC. The tools include True Type Fonts (TTF) and Open Type Fonts (OTF) for Tamil, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-Pon Vizhi for Tamil, Firefox in Tamil, E-Mail Client in Tamil, Office productivity suite in Tamil (BharateeyaOO.o), Tamil Spell checker (Min Olai) & Dictionary.

Dr. Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi, former Chief Minister, Tamil Nadu was the chief guest on the occasion and released the CD amidst a large gathering of stalwarts from the industry, academia, research organizations and officials from the DeitY.

The event was presided by Thiru Dayanidhi Maran, Hon'ble Minister for Communications and IT, Government of India. Commenting on the release, Thiru Maran expressed his pleasure and excitement to note that the release of the Tamil software tools and fonts coincided with the auspicious occasion of a new Tamil New Year. Quoting an UNDP report, he said that although "India has emerged as a pioneer in the Information Technology", while the "digital divide in the country is the highest". Attributing this to the "non-availability of user friendly affordable IT tools in local languages", he explained the initiative of "Language Technology Mission" to marshal Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) programmes launched by DeitY, MC&IT, Government of India, at various agencies as well as that of other public and private agencies. The objective was to bring about practically usable products and solutions into the marketplace at the earliest, even while aiming for world-class research. He said "such tools will not only facilitate common masses but will also encourage software application developers to develop applications in local languages in various sectors of economy". Terming the event as the beginning of a process "for dedicating the tools, products and resources of public use in Indian languages developed so far by government support to the masses", Thiru Maran hoped that "this process will continue and within a year or so we will be able to deliver such products in all Indian languages".

The CD will be made available by the MC&IT to the general public free of cost through a massive circulation campaign to be spread over a period of a year.

On the occasion, Microsoft Corporation also released its Tamil interface for its Office application under the aegis of Project Bhasha, an extensive program launched by Microsoft and aimed at accelerating local language computing in India.

Earlier, S. Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC delivered a presentation on C-DAC's Indian language computing initiative and introduced the various products developed by C-DAC. Thiru G. K. Vasan MP, Thiru Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India and Thiru N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu were the other special invitees at the event.

The TTF fonts for Tamil have been selected through interactions with the publication industry and are used widely in systems working on the Windows 95/ Windows 98/ Windows NT platform. The OTF fonts are for systems working on the Windows 2000/XP/2003 and Linux platforms. This effort is the first of its kind and most of the word processors (existing and new) will be able to make use of these fonts. This in turn will make more fonts available for users with Tamil Net/Tamil 99 and Typewriter keyboards for data entry. The OCR makes it possible to convert scanned image (printed page scanned using scanner) to editable text so that it can be used for other applications and can be modified accordingly. The publishing industry is one of the major beneficiaries, who can use this software to reproduce and bringing out new editions of old and priceless works.

BharateeyaOO.o is a Unicode based office suite in Indian Languages based on an Open Source project developed by Sun Microsystems for its StarOffice™ Productivity Suite, which can be deployed across all major platforms. Presently, it has been customized for the Tamil language and will find applications in content generation and management in areas like education and training, product marketing, campaigns and presentations, web media, Small Office/Home Office and so on. The Tamil OCR-Pons Vizhi has built-in default font information and can recognize a large number of fonts without any training. It provides special facilities for making required corrections very quickly and offers nearly 100% accuracy. The other tools in the CD like Firefox in Tamil, E-mail Client in Tamil, Tamil Dictionary and Spell checker also offer a host of benefits to users who would like to avail the benefits of IT in the Tamil language.