Guidence needed - Fsf-friends

8 Nov 2004


      Hello Friends,
I am facing a problem and need your suggessions. There is some material in english which I want to translate into our local language 
(Telugu). I also want the font to be in Telugu. While there are some free fonts that I know of for Telugu (IIT Madras has got one for their 
multi-lingual editor, and it looks decent enough to me), I am not able to find a nice editor.
I have considered the editor from IITM (at acharya.iitm.net.in....), but its very difficult, given my knowledge of telugu on these 
keyboards. If I have a Telugu Keyboard it would have solved some problem but I searched the market but found none. Now, there are two things 
that I can imagine:
1. Go to a type institute and copy the keys layout, then come back and experiment on my keyboard until i get them right. (it sure is going 
to take a _LOT_ of time, given my current pressures in office).
2. Get hold of a nice editor. Earlier when I was using wind**s, I used a s/w called TeluguLipi Editor, it had this wonderful feature that if 
I type a word in english, it would automatically convert every syllabi of it to Telugu. So, its practically a breeze to type in Telugu using 
that editor with out any knowledge of the telugu keyboard layout. Is there any such editor (Mr. google returned unsatisfactory results) for 
Linux?
I'd be indebted if anyone can  help me out.
Also, one more thing:
A couple of days ago, some of my friends, also in the s/w field (and running a very small charitable trust), donated a computer to a school 
in a very remote village. (I am not a member as such, now, so I dont have a big say). When my friend told me that, I appreciated him but his 
very next sentence disappointed me, he said they had installed M$ Win into it. When I asked them why they were wasting money when they can 
get what ever they wanted to using Free Software, they said its because of the following reasons:
1. No one in the village knew anything about computers, so had to be taught from scratch.
2. None of their group are comfortable with *nix. (A pity)
3. The software that they are planning to provide now is the ones by Azim Premji Foundation 
http://www.azimpremjifoundation.org/html/educationalsoftware.htm which runs on Windows only.
So, they had no choice but to shell out some money and buy Windows in the gray market and load it. When I raised my voice, they expressed 
helplessness saying that their first aim is not to teach computers to kids but to grab their attention towards studies and use educational 
s/w for this purpose. Since I did not know any Edu S/w for linux, I had to shut my mouth. So, im immediately writing to you friends, does 
anyone know anything about this?
Waiting for your replies:
Sriharsha.