Of course, Sanjevani has been podcasting for a while. That’s no surprise, given its history as perhaps the most responsive and innovative of all the Indian newspapers (yes, both English and Indian languages included) to technology. News coverage, though, is another matter.
But tonight, while visiting Sampada after some time, I was pleasantly surprised to see several nice features, especially podcasting. Here in Chicago, we are still struggling to get our folks at the University to make our weekly seminars and other such ‘public’ events available online. So, it was a pleasure to listen to pretty good interviews of Tejaswi, URA, Halemane, Kambara and GSS, writers that I grew up with. They are pretty good company even in the cyberspace, especially on a sleepless night.
Good job, guys. This was fun to listen to.
2. Looking at Sampada, I also began thinking about my own much postponed plans to write Kannada entries regularly. I haven’t figured out the fonts and rendering issues. I am committed to Unicode, and I am a predominantly Mac user. I want to make sure all the browsers display the text properly. Earlier, I was reading Sampada entries using my PC on Firefox and the display was flawless. On my powerbook, that isn’t the case. Anyway, one of these days we will have to stop boasting about our software proficiencies and address these problems.
Sampada seems to be using Drupal. So folks, if you would share your experience and expertise, we would all appreciate that. I haven’t looked at the Sampada archives yet to see if there is any documentation but please send a note or bring to our attention what we need to know. We would all appreciate that. Also, any thoughts on WordPress MU?
6 Comments
This might help you configuring your mac to display kannaDa fonts correctly.
http://web.nickshanks.com/typography/kannada/
It works fine on my collegue’s ibook.
If you are looking for a feature rich CMS, Plone is a great choice - http://www.plone.org,
If it is just blogging, wordpress is still the best bet for most folks. [I use textpattern]
pretty surprised to know that you’re reading us now, while we’ve been reading you for a long time now via Planet.
(hey, just kidding)
Well, there are solutions available on Mac to get Unicode corrected. Read the part for Mac on sampada.net/fonthelp. You can contact Nicholas Shanks if you need any help and I’m sure he would be more than glad to help you out.
About blogging tool, the choice depends on what you intend to do. You can also try textpattern - now almost all open source CMSes and blogging tools available support Unicode.
Cheers,
- h.p.
To ensure that Kannada is rendered effectively in all browsers on all platforms, the first decision to be made is to use unicode and not to use specialized proprietary fonts.
The best instructions on the web for installing Kannada fonts on all platforms is provided by the good folk at Wikipedia:
http://kn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kannada_Support
An effective and [relatively] simple way of creating/testing Kannada script is to use the GNU licence transliterater at http://www.iit.edu/~laksvij/language/kannada.html
Go to the above URL, create the Kannada script, and copy and paste the same into what you want to post. I suggest saving the web page on your computer so that you need not go online each time you need to write in Kannada.
A “professional” way to create Kannada script is to use a Kannada keyboard. You can buy an English keyboard and paste Kannada fonts (from stickers) on it. Here is where you can buy Kannada stickers:
http://www.language-keyboard.com/kannada.htm
If you decide to go the keyboard way, make sure you spend some time on the Wikipedia page.
I suggest that you precede each post in Kannada with the Wikipedia link.
Send me an email if you want a Kannada keyboard, I can have it made and mailed to you (from within the US) in a few days. I can also assist on testing/tech issues.
Prthvi,
omme yilli search maadi sikkidru sikkabahudhu
http://www.kannadaaudio.com/forum/
they got a help page right there, yo
Thanks for the comments and suggestions, guys. Pradeep, I know of Nick Shank’s fonts (actually from HPN’s blog) and downloaded it.
HPN, I have been reading you and Sampada for a while but hadn’t noticed the podcasts until last night.
Yo, the fellow of the murane variety, who you knows who you are and also knows i know who you are etc… have looked much of what you suggest but my lazy self hasn’t done what i need to do. this week shall be the week to finish unfinished works…
Sepoy, as you know from experience, people don’t function that well at 4 in the morning. so blame my blindness….
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