BhashaIndia Expert Chat: The first of many to come - The Report BhashaIndia Expert Chat #1, 4th November, 2005 The first BhashaIndia Expert Chat took place on the 4th of November 2005. Bob Eaton, one of Microsoft’s Most Valued Professionals (MVP), fielded queries on a number of topics from BhashaIndia users. The BhashaIndia Expert Chat series The BhashaIndia Expert Chat series is planned as a forum for developers and users to interact with each other and share their experiences with Indic Language computing. In addition to this BhashaIndia also invites experts (typically Microsoft Most Valued Professionals) to answer queries from users and developers regarding the development and use of Indic tools and applications. The Expert For the first of the chat series, the Expert was Bob Eaton, a Microsoft MVP and an ardent user and developer in the field of Indic Language Computing.Bob is a graduate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cleveland, with a Master's Degree in Computer Science, is now pursuing his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas, Arlington with Kangri as his research subject.With the advent of Unicode, he immersed himself in converting programs to support Unicode. He has also been instrumental in developing SIL Converters that help users convert characters in legacy-encoded fonts to Unicode.Bob lives in Palampur, Himachal Pradesh with his family. The Event The topics under discussion for the first BhashaIndia Expert chat were: Encoding (legacy and Unicode) and encoding conversions (with respect to Devanagari issues) How to create COM objects for use in scripting languages like Microsoft Word VBA? How to make a VC++(nominally version 6.0) program support Unicode? The chat was conducted from the Microsoft facility in Bangalore, India. Most of the 20 or so participants were Indic aficionados and long time users of BhashaIndia. The participants knew Bob quite well, and needed no formal introduction. The participants were very enthusiastic about chatting live with Bob, and the questions were extremely specific and related to mainly practical usage of Unicode and other facets of Indic computing. The major part of the discussion was about encoding and the Unicode standard. Within the subject of encoding and conversions, the questions asked ranged from fundamental queries about which encoding standards were available and the differences between them, to what applications and tools were available for converting between different encoding standards. There were a number of queries about the SIL converter, which Bob has worked extensively with. The TECkit package, developed at SIL for inter-conversions was also discussed in some detail. Bob also covered Code pages and tables, and also volunteered a lot of extremely relevant information of his own accord. Most of the discussion was related to Hindi usage. However, a number of users asked questions about Tamil and other languages as well. Bob’s answers covered the issues under consideration for all languages. The chat, initially planned to be one hour in duration, was extended by another hour on demand by the participants. Bob very graciously consented to stay until all the queries were satisfactorily answered. From encoding and conversion concepts, the conversation moved on to the subject of enabling Unicode support for the VC++ language, particularly Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) applications, wherein the aim was to elaborate on the methods of multilingual application development. Bob started the discussion on VC++ with a general outline of how VC++ differs from VB6 and other programming languages. Since a number of participants were unfamiliar with VC++, this proved to be a great help. Once the basics were covered, the participants had a number of questions to ask, mostly related to implementation of actual functions. Bob answered all of the queries in intricate detail and with amazing speed. The discussion on VC++ revolved around embedding of Unicode into VC++ applications, and comparisons between VB6 and VC++. The Microsoft Layer for Unicode support (MSLU) was also among the topics discussed Bob offered to send participants code snippets on request. The subject covered next was COM objects and scripting languages like Microsoft VBA. Bob answered as many queries as possible on this subject. The number of queries answered and the detailed coverage given to each question was much appreciated by the participants. Over the span of roughly one and a half hours, Bob answered over 35 questions covering almost all of the topics more than sufficiently. The chat concluded with the promise of more such events to come in the future. The transcript of the chat will be available at the BhashaIndia website check out Bob’s interview at BhashaIndia Bob Eaton can be contacted for any queries regarding the topics mentioned above at his e-mail id pete_dembrowski@htmail.com Please Register at BhashaIndia for regular updates regarding more expert chats and other events related to Indic Language Computing.