News

Unicode in India

During a recent visit to Bangalore, ITF had a meeting with Gautam John of Pratham Books.

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit trust dedicated to publishing high-quality children’s books in multiple Indian languages at a affordable cost. They produce over a million books a year in 11 languages, but some of their own content has already been rendered inaccessible due to its being stored using non-standard font encodings. We spoke with Gautam about literacy, languages, accessibility, and Unicode. While ITF has always advocated Unicode standards as the way forward for Indian typography, we were pleased to hear that a large organisation such as Pratham understands the importance of standardisation and is moving towards full adoption of Unicode.

Gautam followed up our conversation with an email where he formulated an internal case for adoption of Unicode at Pratham Books.

  • —Given that Pratham Books publishes in Indian languages, using Unicode fonts is the only way to achieve cross-platform interoperability compatible with a global standard.
  • —Given India’s push towards copyright reform for the visually impaired, it is imperative that Unicode fonts be used in the creation of Indic content (because otherwise there is a huge barrier to conversion to print-friendly formats).
  • —Unicode, as an open global standard, guarantees content accessibility in the future and ensures no proprietary font and vendor lock-in.
  • —There is a severe lack of high quality and varied typefaces that are both screen and print optimised OpenType Indic Unicode fonts.
  • —Given the importance of linguistic diversity to India’s cultural heritage, it is imperative that greater attention is paid to the development of high-quality Indic fonts with flexible licensing.
  • —Use of Unicode will significantly reduce bandwidth/storage, making operations more efficient on the longer run.
  • —Unicode guarantees accessibility of content, e.g. search/sort functionality, text-to-voice and voice-to-text, machine translation, and search engine optimisation.

 

ITF shares this perspective and is prepared to work with publishers and content developers, advising them how to adjust their workflow to achieve greater efficiency and meet current and future needs.

Add new comment

Comments (6)

  • LIANG Hai, 15 March 2011, 09:34 PM

    @Gautam That post looks good! Please keep on. :)

  • Gautam John, 14 March 2011, 01:17 PM

    @Ling Hai: I think I have made a mistake with the point on efficiency of storage. My bad. @Jose: Yes, we are. I have been collecting my thoughts here: http://gkjohn.posterous.com/thoughts-on-unicode-in-india

  • LIANG Hai, 13 March 2011, 09:54 PM

    @Peter Mmm, this is rational. @Jose Considering that OpenType came out almost a decade later, and until today many softwares don't support OpenType, you may be able to imagine how hard it is for industry to embrace an advanced technology (here, both Unicode and OpenType). Indic scripts are relatively really complicated to be typeset, which also led to industry's difficulty to migrate from a finally-there-is-something-workable platform to the new one.

  • Jose T, 13 March 2011, 08:18 AM

    I am even more puzzled by the discussion of Unicode in India, considering that the standard came out in 1989! Is the Indian printing industry really that behind?

  • Peter Bilak, 12 March 2011, 09:24 PM

    I don't want to speak for Gautam, but I suspect that he implies that using Unicode eliminates the need to maintain various custom non-standard encodings, improving the workflow, and limiting the number of data used. So one document is used instead of several ones.

  • LIANG Hai, 12 March 2011, 05:22 PM

    I'm confused by "significantly reduce bandwidth/storage", because Unicode encodings employ at least 2 bytes (in UTF-16; in UTF-8, even worse, 3 bytes) to store 1 Indic letter, but in legacy encodings like ISCII, only 1 byte is used. Is it because that publishers' legacy encoding is something other than ISCII, even not an 8-bit method?

Share
Indian Type Foundry © 2009 – 2013