Nepali Fonts Standard

Nepal Codes for Information Interchange White Paper v2 Font Standardisation Working Committee, 1997 page 4 2. Use of computers in Nepal’s languages. There are four broad areas of potential use for Nepal’s languages in computers. Firstly, publishing. Much printed material that we see on paper is nowadays produced using the computer. This should lead to better quality and cheaper publishing, and the use of computers has certainly helped produce more printed material in languages like Newari, Tamang and Limbu. Our national newspapers are also produced using the computer - and the readers of these papers will be very aware of the lack of quality in handling Nepal’s languages. Sometimes the problems are subtle, with diacritic dots positioned incorrectly beneath a main character, and sometimes the problems are quite gross, such as the use of the wrong form of conjunct - all these problems are caused by inadequacies in the way Nepali and other languages are handled in the computer. Today you cannot publish without computers, and the quality of the result is only as good as the quality of the representation of the language in the computer. Secondly, much information is stored and used within computers, and where this information is about Nepal and is intended for use by the citizens of Nepal, clearly it would be better stored in the appropriate language of Nepal. An example here are the bills from a major utility company of Nepal, where the subscriber’s name has to be transliterated into English and the whole bill is in English apart from a small amount of preprinted Nepali. In the current state of the technology, doing this in Nepali would be possible, but would be risky due to the proprietary nature of current fonts and encodings. Thirdly, information stored in computers may need to be transferred to other computers. This happened informally when people work together to produce this white paper; and we could do this successfully because the language we are using, English, is stored in a common standardised representation for the letters, ASCII or ISO 646, and the word-processing formatting is stored in the industry standard, Rich Text Format (RTF). We need similar widely agreed standards for the languages of Nepal if we are going to be able to transfer information around the Kingdom electronically, as we might want to do when sharing information on the Internet or running a national organisation with branches throughout the country. Fourthly, the very computers themselves interact with their human user in a language, usually English. All those menus are in English, and the manuals you need to turn to for help are in English. Wouldn’t they be better in Nepali or Gurung or Tamang or Rajbangsi or other language of Nepal, in the language that the people using the computer use when talking to each other about the computer? All computer systems in Nepal, in banks, in supermarkets, and in hotels, operate in English. Of course the Nepalese peoples are very good at languages and at English, but that should not mean that they should be forced to use English. To make these systems work in Nepali requires support from within the operating system, working to some agreed standard. 3. Current state of Nepalese languages in computers. Currently there are a large variety of fonts for Nepali available for PCs in Nepal, and some of the very first representations of Devanagari in the computer happened in Nepal. If the hundreds and thousands of fonts available for Devanagari in India are also drawn upon, it might be thought that Nepal has everything it needs. There have also been special fonts produced for Newari, and Kirati and Limbu. However, as seen in the previous section, the quality is not there. These fonts don’t even work for Nepali satisfactorily, let alone the other languages of Nepal. And if we produce a document in Nepali on one computer, and then put that file on a floppy disk and take it to another computer, we may just find that we see garbage when we look at the document on the other computer, because the internal coding of the font on the second computer is different from that on the first computer. Table 2 shows the character sets and encodings for two popular PC fonts.

Nepali Fonts Standard

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