What is Unicode?

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.

Unicode provides a unique number for every character used in the computer, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. This completely minimizes the conflicts and data corruption caused by the incompatible coding system.

With the system globally compatible for any data processing and encoding system the Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.

Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without risk of data being corrupted.

About the Unicode Consortium ::

The Unicode Corsortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. The consortium is supported financially solely through membership dues. Membership in Unicode Consortium is open to organizations and individuals anywhere in the world who support the Unicode Standard and wish to assist in its extension and implementation.

How Does it Help Nepali Computing?

Up to now, various locally developed unauthorized Nepali fonts such as Himali, Preeti, Kantipur, Sama etc. has been developed and used to fulfill the need of documents required in Nepali language. All these fonts, though use the Devnagari font as their base, have different coding system. This brings about a lot of complication in downloading the documents from one pc to other, especially when the document prepared in a particular font doesn’t get downloaded in the other computer in the absence of the same font in the latter one.
To view the document, the exact font had to be installed in the receiving computer. Sometimes even a single page of document may contain several kinds of fonts which make the downloading process even more complicated and time consuming.
But with the Unicode Devnagari font installed in the keyboard, this problem is completely minimized. The Unicode Devnagari font can be downloaded in any computer in any part of the globe provided that has Windows 2000 or XP installed in it.

What is Localization?

Localization is the process of creating or adapting a product to a specific locale, i. e. to the language, cultural context, conventions and market requirements of a specific target market user group or so. A user can interact with a properly localized product using his own language and cultural conventions which meets all the regulatory and other requirements of the user’s country/region. This furthermore implies that all the user-visible text strings and all user documentation (printed and electronic) use the language and cultural conventions of the user.
In this way, software localization can be defined as the process of creating or modifying a software product so that it can be easily used in the local language, culture and environment of a particular region. For this, at the very basic level, the localized system must support the character set of the local language and must be configured to present numbers and other values in a format common to that region and it has to be in standard format so as to ease in transformation of data to and fro.

What is PANL10n Localization Project?

PAN Localization Project is the IDRC supported multi-nation localization project currently being conducted in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal and Sri-Lanka where NUCES of Pakistan had taken the lead. Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya from Nepal had taken the lead in representing the project. The project will be developing the Nepali version of Open Office (word processor, spreadsheet presentation, web-browser and email client application) with help files. The project also aims to localize an Open Source accounting software in Nepali. All these software will be integrated in Nepali GNU/Linux distribution with Nepali interface and manuals as well as help files in Nepali.