Bhasha Workshop 2004, Chennai – A Report
By Sharon Vandana
Vishwak Solutions
Pvt. Ltd.
Introduction
One indicator of Microsoft's growing fascination for Unicode and Indic
computing and its craving to reach to the grassroots of India is vividly
exhibited from the workshops that it is organizing throughout India.
Microsoft India organized the Bhasha Workshop in Chennai, India at the Taj
Connemera Hotel on March 30 & 31, 2004. Prominent Linguistic Specialists,
researchers, and multi-lingual software vendors and multi-lingual enthusiasts
attended the Workshop from in and around Chennai. The first day sessions
covered the basics of Indic computing and the second day sessions were more
technical and targeted the actual application developers.
I was one of the delegates representing Vishwak Solutions Pvt.Ltd., Chennai,
India, a fast growing company focused on building outstanding capabilities in
selected areas such as Portal Management & .NET Migration.
Background
The objective of the Workshop was to create awareness amongst the localization
community in the country and to help local software developers understand how
they can help develop multi-lingual applications on Microsoft Technologies.
Prominent speakers and linguistic specialists included Dr.U.B.Pavanaja, Mr.
Deepak Gulati, Mr. Venkatarangan and Ms.Srimathi.
About the Speakers
Dr. U. B. Pavanaja was a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,
Mumbai, for about 15 years. He did his advanced research at Taiwan. After
leaving BARC in 1997, he dedicated himself fully for the cause of Computer and
Indian languages. He is currently heading his own venture called Vishva Kannada
Softech. He has been awarded the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional)
award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of indic
computing, especially Kannada. The MVP Award is given in recognition of a
recipient's technical expertise, spirit of community, and their willingness to
help their peers by providing reliable and accurate answers to technical
questions about Microsoft products & technologies.
Mr. T. N. C. Venkatarangan is the Chairman and Managing Director
of
Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd. which focuses on Portal Management &
.NET application development and Migration solutions worldwide. Mr.Venkat
believes in giving back to the community what he has received. Helping him to
achieve this is his nomination to the position of Microsoft Regional Director,
Chennai in the year 1999.
Mr. Deepak Gulati is a technology expert who is passionate about
software internationalization issues, especially Indian language support in
Microsoft products. He knows to read and write in four Indian languages.
Currently, the India Communities Specialist at Microsoft, India, he is
responsible for fostering developer communities in India.
Ms. V. Srimathi is a Senior Software Architect at Vishwak Solutions Pvt.
Ltd. She is passionate about .NET. She recently spoke at TechEd 2003, India.
She has also conducted over 20 .NET labs for Microsoft in Chennai, India.
Bhasha Workshop
The event started with the registrations. Each delegate was given a Bhasha
Workshop CD which had some useful content on Unicode along with the other
material.
Mr.Deepak Gulati started the Workshop by showing a video on Microsoft's
initiative to deliberate the development and computerization of languages in
India at a national level and the promotion of Indic computing in India. He
then did a quick run-through of the introduction presentation. He enlightened
most of us by putting in the picture the percentage of Indians who do not
understand English, the percentage of media and TV Channels being regional and
non-English. He emphasized that languages are the key to IT Acceleration. The
need for writing and developing software that support Indian languages was felt
vividly. The general outlay of the presentation was to increase the awareness
of reaching the masses with computers, the need for internet penetration to
multiply and E-governance success metrics to increase. He highlighted on
Microsoft's mission for India namely Education proliferation, Localization,
Community outreach and Developer Ecosystem. He illustrated the road map of
Microsoft's growth in terms of Indic computing since 1997 (when Mr. Bill Gates
visited India) to 2002, (when the Office Hindi was announced by Bill Gates)
& the ongoing work on the support for Bengali & Malayalam. He then
introduced Microsoft's Project Bhasha and how it complies with Microsoft's
vision of reaching to the grassroots of India.
The next presentation was also presented by Mr.Deepak Gulati. It was about 'An
introduction to Globalization and Localization basics'. It was a real
insight into concepts such as Locales, Cultures, Number formatting and Date
formatting. The presentation conferred clarity into basics of Indic computing.
The main imperatives were on why Indic support is important, basic definitions
on Globalization, Localizability, Localization & Resources, Indian language
support in XP and Windows Server 2003, Language groups, Types of Locales, UI
Language, Browser Language settings, Naming conventions, Date Formatting,
Number Formatting & Currency Formatting. Many had the delusion that
localization was translation until Deepak explained that localization was not
just translation or typing in our own language. The languages supported in XP
and Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows 2000 was put in the picture. The
importance of language groups and their 3 types and how it can be installed was
also shown. How locale settings affect the behavior of our applications and the
different types of locales and its customization was explained. The
availability of MUI (Multilingual User Interface) for Office Hindi (launched
recently by Microsoft) and Windows XP LIP (Language Interface pack) was let
known. (The MUI enables you to select the language in which we want our menus,
dialogs and pop-ups to appear). This was quite interesting to many. How
Internet Explorer allows the user to select the browser language setting and
offers information customized to user's language preference was depicted.
Naming conventions that had to be adhered to, types of dates, the implication
of locale awareness and how it affects the date was brought out. The six major
issues related to number formatting, key issues related to currency formatting
and the functions available was explained.
After a short tea break, the next presentation started. It was on 'Encoding
Indian scripts and languages' by Dr.U.B Pavanaja. He started with a
picture of the tree of Indian scripts. He then showed a table of the various
Indic languages and its relevant script, say, for Punjabi, the script is
Gurumukhi/Urdu. He then explained the basic rudiments that go into Indic
languages i.e. Vowels (Swara), Consonants (Vyanjana) & Conjuncts
(gunithaksharas). He then explained about the difference between English and
Indic languages. The concept of encoding scripts such as ISCII and Unicode was
made clear. The problems of font based solutions were depicted along with a
demo. ISCII and Unicode charts were shown to clarify. The Unicode Encoding
schemes a.k.a transformations such as UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE & UTF-32
was explained. A demo on Byte Order Mark (BOM) was exhibited. Then, Unicode
Collation was explained along with a demo. The importance of Unicode in
developing applications was established. Dr.Pavanaja ended the presentation by
expounding about the Microsoft Community Glossary (standardized glossaries of
technical IT terms in the local languages) introduced recently in
BhashaIndia.com and how we could contribute and build it.
Dr.Pavanaja handled the next presentation also. It was about 'From Input to
Display'. He exemplified ways of entering the Indic data using
Inscript, Typewriter and Transliteration IME, displaying the Indic data font
such as Bitmap, Type-1, TrueType & OpenType, Storing the Indic data through
ISCII and Unicode & Collation as per Indic sorting order. He showed a demo
on OTF (OpenType font). He then spoke about the Unicode Script Processor and
how it provides system level support for rendering of complex script languages.
The next highlight was on what Uniscribe does and about the special two
characters in Unicode (ZWJ & ZWNJ). To end the session, a short demo on ZWJ
and ZWNJ was also shown.
After lunch, we were back to the next session which was handled by Mr.TNC
Venkatarangan. He spoke on 'Indic support on Microsoft Technologies'. He
started on the main attributes of Indic language support in Windows 2000. He
explained why individual binaries need not be created for each language during
localization, the availability of fully Unicode support and how ANSI/OEM is no
more used, Complex script support, Multilingual User Interface, Fonts and
Uniscribe engine. He then illustrated how Indic script support can be enabled
in Windows 2000 through enabling Indic functionality at OS level & setting
User, Input and System locale. The next area was about Indic support in Windows
XP/2003. He brought out the added benefits available such as the availability
of new locales, coverage of existing features available in Windows 2000, new
location variable, Invariable location and how it requires few reboots each
time an installation is done. He then explained the rewards of using the MUI,
naming files in Indic languages, setting the browser language and the use of
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE server variable. He then substantiated the support for
Indic languages in MS-Office i.e. MS-Word, MS-Excel & MS-Outlook. The
different data types for Indic language in SQL Server, MS-Access, .NET,C &
C++ and the string comparison and sorting functions of SQL, Win 32 and .NET,
that he pointed out was beneficial for the group of developers in the
gathering. He then explained the method of retrieving the current Cultureinfo
using the 'Current culture' property, changing the culture of an application
and creating a webpage with Indic text using resource files.
The next session was a short session on 'MSKLC (Microsoft Keyboard Layout
Creator)' imparted by Dr.Pavanaja. The main objective of the session
was to encourage everyone to create their own keyboards in their own Indic
languages. The steps of creating a keyboard layout seemed to be so simple when
Dr.Pavanaja demonstrated the creation of a new keyboard layout from scratch.
The platform support, the system requirements, the languages not supported
& limitations was also highlighted.
The next 45 mins was dedicated for Indic FAQ. Many questions lingering in the
minds of many were clarified by the speakers. Hands-on-trial was also provided
for the Indic enthusiasts. Computers with all the Indic softwares were provided
for them to try their hands at. With this, the first day ended with a great
sensation.
The second day was even more enthusiastic as more people turned out the
previous day. Being the last day of the 2-day workshop, the sessions were more
interesting and practical aiming more at the Indic developers.
Deepak Gulati started with '.NET for Indian languages'. He emphasized on
the need for world ready applications and the how we must focus our attention
on the three key issues of globalization, localizability, and localization
throughout the application design and development process and the need to use
Resources. He elucidated on how the .NET Framework provides wide-ranging
support for the development of world-ready applications by making use of the
classes in System.Globalization namespace. The use of the CultureInfo class
which provides culture-specific information, such as the language,
country/region, calendar, and cultural conventions associated with a specific
culture and the way in which it performs culture-specific operations, such as
casing, formatting dates and numbers, and comparing strings was also clarified
and more on Culture names, the 3 types of cultures and the code declarations in
VB.NET and C# & the Culture tree. The use of LCID to create instances of
CultureInfo, Enumerating Cultures, setting CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture,
Overriding User settings, using CultureInfo in an API, other classes in
System.Globalization, Formatting strings, date and time, parsing date and time
in C#, NumberFormatInfo, .NET Framework Resource Model, steps of localizing a
Web based UI & Winforms UI was also dealt with. An ASP.NET localized
application and Localizing Windows Forms was also shown as a demo.
After a short tea break, we were off to the next session on 'Websites in Indian
languages' by Dr.Pavanaja. He started with the methods adopted earlier
of how text was scanned and put up on the website as an image and how fonts had
to be downloaded by the user to read a multilingual site and how dynamic fonts
helps to ease the pain of downloading. He elaborated on the two types of
websites and how CSS and fonts go into the static webpage with a demo on the
use of HTML and CSS. He then highlighted the use of dynamic fonts and its
types. A demo on
WEFT (Web Embedding Font tool) helped in learning the creation of EOT
files. A demo on Unicode websites using <META> tags and <SPAN> tags
was illustrated. The difficulties inherent to building multilingual websites
was also listed followed by the main things that a user should do while
localizing applications. He then ended the session by listing out the goals of
globalization and the steps of the localization process.
After lunch, we were back for the next session on 'SQL Server' by Deepak
Gulati again. He showed the usage of data types such as nchar, nvarchar and
ntext to store Unicode data and the use of prefixing strings with 'N' (which
stands for national) by writing SQL queries.
Mr.Venkat handled the next presentation on 'SharePoint Portal Team Services and
SharePoint Portal Server' dexterously. He pointed out the significant
features of Windows SharePoint Services (a collection of services for Microsoft
Windows Server™ 2003) that you can use to create team-oriented Websites to
share information and foster collaboration with other users on documents and
the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (a secure, scalable, enterprise portal server
built upon Windows SharePoint Services) that you can use to aggregate
SharePoint sites, information, and applications into a single portal. He
brought out the different challenges or difficulties faced by customers
worldwide and few feedbacks on Sharepoint Team Services, Sharepoint Portal
Server 2001 and deeper Sharepoint integration. He defended Sharepoint's
strategy of giving to the customer consistent rich experience, smart
connections and flexible deployments and thereby enabling smart connected
workplaces. Ms.Srimathi outlined the benefits of the Sharepoint services by
ardently demonstrating with a sample website.
The benefits of Windows Sharepoint Services that help increase individual and
team productivity through Document file sharing, customizing and extending
SharePoint sites with Site templates, List templates, Themes and Web Parts that
can be added to the page by the site owners was explained very vividly. The
process of creating a virtual server, configuring users and their rights,
setting site/sub-site settings, defining site structure and adding links and
search settings was shown.
We then departed for a short tea break, after which the last session was on 'OpenTypeFont
and VOLT' by Dr.Pavanaja started with the steps for creating OTF. He
elaborated on the OpenType Font tables such as GDEF,GSUB, GPOS & BASE. The
use of VOLT for adding OpenType tables to fonts was demonstrated.
The workshop came to an end with the 'Hands-on-trial'. Most of us were
trying our hands on the computers by calling to mind, the outstanding
information we had gathered during the 2 days.
Last but not the least, every delegate was awarded a T-shirt with the Bhasha
Workshop logo on it, which would definetly jog everyone's memory and thus
remind them to put to use the different aspects learnt during the workshop and
broaden the magnitude of indic computing in India.
Summary
All participants completed a feedback form at the end of each session and at
the end of the workshop. All responded to the questions and there was
considerable consistency with the responses. Mostly, the overall feedback on
the event was positive. There were about 75 delegates approx. Most of us felt
that the sessions and the focused discussions were good or excellent. None of
the sessions was felt to be poor or unsatisfactory. When asked what they liked
most about the whole event, responses fell into four main categories:
-
Few appreciated most, the opportunity to meet with other Indic
developers.
-
Some enjoyed being able to find out more about other services.
-
Others favored the opportunity to exchange views with other
Indic developers and ask questions.
-
Some appreciated the workshop, the arrangements, venue and the
materials.