We had started 2012 with a few things to reactivate Odia Computing work.
Now as the year is about to end we should take a look at where we stand
and where to go. As usual, the initial enthusiasm has evaporated with
time and under pressure of other matters on hand. This is bound to happen
unless some definite programme is taken up in one's own interest and is
pursued without external promptings.
However, we have benefited much from this brief active period. We have
three Odia font converters (8bit to Unicode) and several other corpora
tools available - thanks to Hariram, Ajit and Arun. We have tested,
modified and uploaded these at
https://bitbucket.org/rebati/rebati/
under downloads. We have also
finalised an Odia keyboard layout (same for both Linux and Windows 7) an
uploaded to bit bucket. Please try these out and help us with any
feedback. There are a few additions we would like to see in the Odia
fonts - punctuations and roman characters and diacritics - and will take
this up with the RedHat group. Odia sorting requires a lot more work, but
we get near-perfect output only with LibreOffice Calc (both under Linux
and Windows 7. We need much help with this and with
Scribus-Indic.
Our digitization work has reached a point of saturation as far as the
Odia periodicals are concerned. The current holding of about 1,30,000
paged (~20 gb of optimised pdf files) comprises about *0 % of all Odia
periodicals published between 1870 and 1950. We are hoping to release
these at the Ravenshaw University in early 2013. We would also release
these on 5 DVD's for researchers. Hosting these on the internet is a
massive job that is beyond our present capabilities, but we are working
on it.
Our future work will be on finalising the ongoing work with Odia
dictionaries, corpora, glossary and the digitization of books. We hope to
pick up a bit of our neglected work on science too.
Hope Rebati can get a better life in 2013. With warmest thoughts for the
New Year,
All of us at Srujanika
--
Dr. Nikhil Mohan Pattnaik, Co-ordinator,
"Srujanika"
101 Saraswati Kunja,
Near Jagamara Bazar, PO: Khandagiri,
Bhubaneswar 751030
Odisha, India
Tel: (0674) 2350640 / 2350664
Srujanika: A Society for Research and Innovation in Science, Education
and
Development