Exposition - Vol. II No. 3 October

Home > Digital Library > Index of Newsletters > Vol. II No. 3 October - December 1994 >

EXPOSITIONS

Vidura - The Multilingual Computer Software

Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, Academic Director of IGNCA, discussing with the faculty during the Vidura workshop

Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts has very ambitious and rich profile of activities in the area of inter-disciplinary multilingual publications. As a first step in this direction using modern computer technology, the need for DTP multilingual text process was felt. In 1987, IGNCA had discussions with National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), Bombay for designing and developing such a software package for its publication use. As a first phase programme, Bengali, Devanagari, Oriya and Tamil scripts in addition to Roman with diacritics developed. The package provides the system of automatic transliteration among all these scripts barring the exception that a matter in any of the four Indian scripts can be transliterated into Roman automatically.

Over the years NCST in close interaction with IGNCA have developed such a package. This package was tested thoroughly and the improvements suggested were incorporated. It was then felt necessary to impart training to the scholars engaged in academic and publication programmes as well as the cataloguing professionals involved in dealing with such texts, besides computer personnel. A short-term workshop was organised to impart so that the package is effectively utilized by them in IGNCA publication programmes. Accordingly a workshop of two days duration was drawn up in consultation with NCST team and organized during 23-24 December 1994 at IGNCA, New Delhi in the Computer Cell. The complete technical support was extended by S.P. Mudur, R.K. Joshi, Mandalia and N. Nayak from NCST and IIT, Bombay. The academic guidance by provided by AD, MS and CO(KK).

Features of Vidura

Vidura package is an interactive multilingual text processing system for handling many of the Indian scripts including the Roman script, with diacritical marks needed for Sanskrit texts transliteration. This system has been developed for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. By National Centre for Software Technology. This package consists of modules for all the tasks of document input editing and page composition and also a single integrated representation for a document complete with layout attributes. With this package one can now key in text, edit text, design page layouts and also print a finished document with a relatively small and inexpensive computer and laser printer. There are various text processing utilities lie Lexicographic sorting, automatic transliteration and document merging.

In the Roman script, as is used for English, the phonetic form of words in the language, basically pronunciation, is ambiguous (the but-put problem). This is taken care of by adding diacritical marks in this information. A set of diacritical marks was provided to NCST based on which the first version of the package was developed by them. Calligraphic fonts have also been specially designed by R.K. Joshi for this package. Mudur and his colleagues have demonstrated and explained the details to the participants and others.

Adequate theory and hands-on-training on computer multilingual keyboard were given to the workshop participants by S.P. Mudur and R.K. Joshi. Under the guidance of Academic Director two case studies were picked up from the Ragalaksana and Satapathabrahmana. The participants were exposed to formatting, editing, sorting, creation and printing techniques.

T.A.V. Murthy

[ Newsletter | List of Newsletter ]

[ Home | Search | Contact Us | Index ]