People have been using computers for typing and printing Kannada text for more than 25 years. Majority of the usage of Kannada on computers was limited in the DTP arena. People made use of packages like PageMaker (Version 6.5 or 7) to type and compose the pages. Even now many people still use these packages for Kannada DTP work. The text entered into these packages is actually stored as font glyph codes rather than character encodings. Non-Unicode truetype fonts like Nudi, Baraha, ShreeLipi, Akruti, etc., are some of the most popular fonts being used. The system does not understand these characters as Kannada characters. Any text based operations like search, replace, sorting, spell-check, text-to-speech, etc., are not possible with this kind of text. Employing Unicode for all digitisation works of Kannada text solves this problem. Usage of Unicode for Kannada has become prominent only recently. All websites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikisource, etc., want the text in Unicode only. There is still a large amount of text entered and stored with old non-Unicode font based encodings. These are mostly present in the form of PageMaker files. This blog explains the process of converting the text present in PageMaker into Kannada Unicode text.
Kannada and Culture Department of Govt of Karnataka have released Unicode complaint opentype fonts and Unicode based software for Kannada under GPL. These are available for free download at their website. Download and install “Ascii to Unicode Kannada Converter” from this page. This software works in Windows only. Now you are ready to convert the text from PageMaker file into Unicode.
Open the PageMaker file. Select the Text tool depicted by a big “T” shaped icon. Click anywhere in the text area. Select the entire text (Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C). Now open Notepad and paste this text into that (press Ctrl-C). The text will appear gibberish in Notepad. Don’t worry about it. Save the file as plain text file (.TXT file). Remember where you have saved the file.
Now run the “Kannada ASCII Unicode Converter” software. In the first textbox enter the name of the ASCII file to be converted (the file you just saved from Notepad). In the bottom textbox enter a filename for the Unicode text file that will be created by the software. Select the default “GOK (Kuvempu Nudi Baraha)”, or other encoding as the case may be, as the encoding from which the text has to be converted. Click on the button written “ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಿ”. It will show the progress of conversion.
Once the conversion is complete, it will display appropriate message to indicate the completion of the conversion. If you open the text file created by the software, it will have the text converted into Unicode. This text can be used in Wikisource, Wikipedia, etc.
ನನಗೆ ಅಗತ್ಯವಾಗಿ ಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವ ANSI ಇಂದ Unicode ಗೆ ಬದಲಾಯಿಸುವ ಪ್ರರೂಪವನ್ನು ಈ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಓದಿ ತಿಳಿದುಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದೇನೆ. ಈ ವಿವರಣೆಯನ್ನು ಕೊಟ್ಟ ಪವನಜ ಸರ್, ನಿಮಗೆ ಧನ್ಯವಾದ. ನಾನು ೨೭-೧೦-೨೦೧೬ ರಂದು ಪ್ರಜಾವಾಣಿಯ ಕಾಮನಬಿಲ್ಲು ವಿಭಾಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಕಂಡ ಸಲಹೆ ಒಂದನ್ನು ಓದಿ ಈ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ನ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿದಿದ್ದೇನೆ
ಡಾ||ಹೆಚ್.ವಿ.ವೇಣುಗೋಪಾಲ್
ನಿವೃತ್ತ ಪ್ರಾಂಶುಪಾಲರು
ನ್ಯಾಷನಲ್ ಕಾಲೇಜು, (ಸ್ವಾಯತ್ತ)
ಬಸವನಗುಡಿ, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು.
ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ವಿರುದ್ಧವಾದದ್ದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ನೀಡಿ ಸರ್.
ಯೂನಿಕೊಡ್ನಿಂದ ನುಡಿಬರಹಕ್ಕೆ ಬದಲಾಯಿಸಲು ಮಾರ್ಗ.
link for software not working
ಯುನಿಕೋಡ್ ತುಂಗಾ ಫಾಂಟ್ ನಿಂದ ನುಡಿ-ಬರಹ ಸ್ಕ್ರಿಪ್ಟ್ ಗೆ ಪರಿವರ್ತಿಸಬೇಕಿದೆ. ನಾವೆಷ್ಟು ಟ್ರೈ ಮಾಡಿದರೂ ಅದರ ವೀಡಿಯೊ ಬರುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಪರಿವರ್ತಕ ಡಿಸ್ಪ್ಲೇ ಆಗುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ. ದಯವಿಟ್ಟು ಪರಿವರ್ತಕ ಡಿಸ್ಪ್ಲೇ ಆಗುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡಿ