A very good news. I am just coming from a meeting with Mr. M.S. Sridhar (of Cyberscape Multimedia Limited) and Prof. Jitender Shaw (VJTI, Mumbai). Sridhar is releasing the Indian Language TTF fonts (more than hundred) under GPL today the the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. He has fonts for all the languages. The press release and release note will be posted by evening. I wanted to break the news to all of you. We have been trying to have this meeting happen, but it happened today. The fonts will be putup on FSF-India's website for download, as well as their companies web site. The details will be announced soon. I will put it up on the FSF site as soon as I get the CD. We can also put them up at indic-computing site at sourceforge.

Now the task is to make use of the set of TTF fonts and solve the immediate problem of encoding and rendering with TTF fonts in all the Indian Languages and release the GNU/Linux distro with GNOME applications enabled by January 26. The next task is to convert these fonts to Open Type fonts as soon as possible.

Mr. Sridhar is only anticipating from the free software community the technical know how so that their company will also start developing applications under GNU/Linux OS, and also help us solve the problem of converting TTF to OTF.

I hope this news will add momentum to the efforts of localization. I wish to thank on behalf of the free software community Sridhar and also Jitender Shaw for initiating this process and making this happen. I think this gesture of Sridhar will be a slap on the face of CDAC and other both Govt and private companies who are refusing to share such resources.

Nagarjuna