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| Friday, 13 June 2003 |
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The Council for Information Technology (CINTEC) has recognised that one of the major impediments to the development and use of the Internet and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in Sri Lanka, especially in rural areas, is the lack of local language content. The availability of a high quality, free, and standards-conformant Sinhala font would enable content providers to create Sinhala language content, and for the interchange of Sinhala characters in the communication media. CINTEC first addressed this in the eighties when it set up the Committee on Adaption of National Languages in IT (CANLIT) with the NARESA and later set up the committee on recommending standards for Sinhala and Tamil in IT: which resulted in a unique Sinhala alphabet and alphabetic order being agreed on, and the Draft Standard Code for the use of Sinhala and Tamil Script in Computer Technology being approved by the CINTEC Council. In December 2002, CINTEC decided that a Committee on Unicode Compatible Sinhala Fonts should be formed. The Committee comprises the .LK domain registrar, representatives from CINTEC, newspapers, universities, and font developers. This Committee would define the basic minimum requirements for Unicode compatible Sinhala fonts; define the essential features which should be present in a Sinhala character set, character combinations and their input, address the requirements for a standard Sinhala keyboard, keyboard stroke sequences, and issues relating to the glyphs and keyboard drivers. The Committee on Unicod Compatible Sinhala Fonts is developing specifications for implementing Sinhala fonts based on the Unicode standard. CINTEC will therefore be holding a workshop for developers of fonts and applications in Sinhala or Tamil today June 13 to present the interim report on: * The representation of the Sinhala character in Unicode. * Keyboard layout and operations. * Printed and on-screen representation of characters. |
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