Bhasa Workshop for Microsoft Student Partners

Date: Friday, May 2, 2009

Venue: Unlimited Building, Khichapokhari, Kathmandu.

Participants: Nepalese Microsoft Student Partners and guests.

 

‘More than 90% of Nepali population is not good at English. But, more than 90% of the computations, including the websites are in English. The problem of hacked font based solutions for Indic computing is over. Now, we can develop really OS supported fully integrated OS solutions employing Unicode.’

 

I think this rationale is just sufficient to justify why attending the Bhasa Workshop fully driven by the series of hands on presentations from Country Manager of Microsoft Nepal, Mr. Allen Bailochan Tuladhar was fruitful. Yes, the ultimate goal of the Workshop was to be able to develop products which would be used in Nepal and particularly target the growing Nepalese market.

 

The workshop got started at 9 am in the morning with an interesting and informative video clip by Young Asia Televison in which Mr. Tuladhar was tagged as King of the Nepalese Software Market. It’s commendable to note that he and his unlimited team were able to produce and supply softwares as per the demand of Nepalese market which otherwise the international software industry would not have created for the developing countries like Nepal.

 

Then, after a short rudimentary session on fonts and Unicode, the workshop took full swing in discussing several aspects of ‘Bhasa’ (which means language in Nepali) including Globalization, Localizability, Localization and Resources. It was interesting to learn from the grass root level that to simplify the installation in Windows platform to meet the user’s requirement, the languages with similar characteristics are grouped together into collections and hence there are mainly three main language categories: European, East Asian and Indic languages. This discussion primarily focused on the various types of Locales it’s installation in OS. The presentation seemed so simple in itself yet the content was very informative and practical.

Between the sessions, Mr. Nutan Marasini, an SQL expert, gave a glimpse of front and back end aspects in web development, presented his expertise in SQL and database basics and unicode implementation for multi-lingual approach.

 

We also had a session on Indic languages in which we got to learn Unicode, Complex Script support, Multi Lingual User Interface and fonts among others. The sessions were pretty long and it wasn’t really easy to spend hours in a single sitting. So, Mr. Tuladhar time and again came up with cool jokes and Video clips that supported Bhasa Workshop some way and smartly captured the refreshed attention from the participants.

 

The session on Open Type Font (OTF) was the core part of the workshop. And, this component was not so easy to learn though. But, somehow I guess we all survived. In between, looking at the procedure, it seemed creating the glyphs were really tedious. But, yes again, it’s a known fact, hard work never goes unnoticed. We were pretty sure the end result would be magnificent. FontoGrapher was a good application to create glyphs yet there were other tools like FontLab to play around. Gradually, we got to know about using VOLT (download here), a great tool for adding Opentype tables to fonts and we had hands on session in its implementation as well.

 

A 45 minutes long lunch break in the afternoon gave us a good time to fuel up and stretch out ourselves and two coffee sessions and circulation of goodies kept us lively for around 8 and half hours, thanks to Microsoft support!

 

 

Finally, what I can say is the taste of Nepali bhasa and Nepali font with Microsoft’s tongue was absolutely tasty!

 

 

 

Published 05-02-2009 11:40 AM by System
Filed under: , ,

Comments

# Kushal Gautam said on 04 May, 2009 11:54 PM

"King of the Nepalese Software Market"??

Nepal's a Republic now, hahaha

Well Dr. Basudev Tripathy's title 'Modern Bhanubhakta' is Good Enough.

Well this was one of the most informative and productive workshop that I've attended on Microsoft. The first session was

made interesting by conducting a 10 mins MSP TV Show. Those who were not there, missed it.

Then, it was so shameful to all of us that we din know the basics of Nepal, i mean that we did not know that the word 'क्ष'

was composed of 'क्' ‌+ 'ष'. But that happens, coz देवनागरी लिपि is like that. The Indic Languages are more complicated than others.

It was a matter of pride to learn that, Nepali language is accessible on the computers too. We could know that Microsoft

MDP Nepal had a big role in formulating the glossary on Nepali language for the uniformity.

More importantly, we got the idea of unicode about what it was and how it worked. Learned about the different types of

fonts.

And the most surprising part was that Adobe didn't support the Unicodes or Open Type fonts. I was really surprised to know

that when I came home and tried to type the unicode characters.

And Nutan Sir gave a brief idea on creating the Multilingual websites based on resources but not altering the main Engine. That was informative too...

For the time being, I remember these things. I am feeling sleepy too, heheh.....

# System said on 06 May, 2009 04:47 PM

Oh yes! Somebody might be wondering why MSPs in the second picture above are all closing their eyes.Don't be mistaken but they are not sleeping; in fact, at the end of the workshop, everybody there went through meditation and this is a part of it.

It was again a good experience.