[Wikimediaindia-l] (OT) On the importance of Unicode

[Gautam John]

On 24 February 2011 10:12, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com> wrote:

> Even though Central Government has adopted Unicode as the encoding standard,
> the case is not the same with most State Governments. As far as I know only
> few state goverments (Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kerala,...) had adopted Unicode
> standard. Many are still in the ASCII era.

Thank you, Shiju. A question - what are the hesitancies for
Governments to move to Unicode as the encoding standards? Is it the
tools they use? The workflow? A legacy issue - "we'll never be able to
open our old files"?

I'm trying to map this space out - it's just that I am coming to see
it as being really really important and want to try and do something
here.

Also, the GoI is slowly making some noises about standards and
openness etc. and I am hoping this are small points that can add up.
For example, the TAGUP report:
http://finmin.nic.in/reports/TAGUP_Report.pdf