Workshop from W3C-India on "HTML 5 tour in India" 25th Sept 2013 Pune

    Cant call it exactly workshop, it was more like demonstrating power of HTML5 and explaining concepts and increasing awareness so more and more people start building powerful websites based on HTML5.

    Workshop  in Pune city  was one of the part of whole HTML5 tour in India. W3C India's plan was to cover major regions of India and spread the thought everywhere. W3C guys covered different topics at different cities (See program for more details [1]).

    Was lucky that after long time got a chance to meet Raymond Doctor, we discussed on some projects and planned to meet soon to discuss more on those. 

    First time got a chance to hear CDAC DG Prof. Rajat Moona [2] and liked his motivation speech of explaining how technologies evolved during the time.

    After his talk In pre-lunch session Michael smith [2] calmly explained W3C initiative and motivatoin behind each initiative. Basic motivation is solving the problems. He expressed his concern about though W3C is developing protocols faster but due to dependence on web browsers it does not reach to masses in timely manner.

    I really appreciate Michael for the way he answered each question from audience in very detailed way.

    Post lunch session was mainly on webRTC. I am really impressed with the demonstration of the webRTC and i am sure it is going to be one of the threat to video conferencing application. Some of Machael's session on webRTC are already available on youtube.

    Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni explained about the importance of epub3 guidelines w.r.t. complexities of Indian scripts.

       I have done some tweets during the workshop, one can find it from [4].

    Workshop was housefull. There were number of students present. Due to small size halls some audience was attending workshop on projectors. I think W3C should really improve this and next time plan for auditorium with more capacity.

    Since most of the people only attended one of the part of whole HTML5 tour, i requested w3cindia provide videos of sessions happened in other cities. I think it will be made available on w3cindia website.

1. http://www.w3cindia.in/HTML5-tour-2013/program.html (Still not understanding why this link is not opening in Firefox sometime)
2. http://www.cdac.in/html/message/dg-profile.aspx
3. http://people.w3.org/mike//
4. https://twitter.com/search?q=%40prravins%20%23html5&src=typd

Before the alpha release of Lohit Devanagari from Lohit2 project

   I am hoping now most of the contributors around are aware regarding the lohit2 project. Before the Alpha release of Lohit Devanagari i think it is important to go through once again goals we planned for this project[1].

    Goals:

    1. Cleaning Lohit Open type tables.
    Highlights are as below

• We rewritten all GSUB rules from scratch.
• New rules are supporting both deva and dev2 script tag
• Done testing on Harfbuzz as well with Uniscribe and its giving expected results.
• Kept GPOS tables intact.
• Effectiveness and efficiency [2]  (sfd file size is down by 28K and Binary file side is down by 4K)

    Found one bug w.r.t harfbuzz [3] and looking forward to get it resolved soon. Presently it is in know issue list.

    By Beta we will have some more improvement on this.

    2. Reusable Open type tables.
    We got two important suggestions on this line, so below are suggestions and action taken on it.
    1st suggestion
    To have feature file separate than shapes .sfd file for easy re-usability of OT rules.

• Thanks to AravindaK, he has already done some work on that line[4], so just using those stuff. I have forked this gitrepo and doing some improvement in it. Once done will request Aravinda to merge with his repo.

    2nd suggestion
    To follow AGL[5] and to have readable glyph naming.  We were also thinking from this perspective.

•   This has became a bit complex glyphlist.txt [6] suggest names like "kadeva" or uni0915. But we dont want to follow uni0915 as it is not very readable considering our re-usability goals.
• {0915 (kadeva) + 094D (viramadeva) + 0937 (ssadeva)} following this create chances of glyph name string more than 31 characters limit.
• So present plan is follow above "kadeva_viramadeva_ssadeva" as much as possible and if it goes above 31 characters we will discard "deva" part from glyphname.

    3. Following of existing standards/guidelines
    Dont know how many of you aware regarding "Devanagari Script Behaviour For Hindi"[7] Draft, so its basically guideline for Font developers. I have one blog pending on this. Though this is draft mode we are trying to follow this, since it is very informative and prepared after consulting to language experts.

    This is where we upto, if anything more needed do provide me your feedback. Also need to decide on release version, i think some version with -alpha will work.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. Effective means it should work on all supported platform perfectly and efficient means compact and clear rule
3. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69266
4. https://github.com/aravindavk/
5. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
6. http://kaz.dl.sourceforge.net/project/aglfn.adobe/glyphlist.txt
7. http://tdil-dc.in/tdildcTemp/articles/75443Consolidated%20Feedback%20&%20Observations%20on%20Draft%20Devnagari%20Script%20Behaviour%20Ver%201.4.8_June_13.pdf

One of the happenning event FUEL GILT conference 6-7 Sept 2013 @ Pune, India

    I would like to start this blogpost with saying one of the successful conference happened during recent times in GILT industry in India. One can get idea from the power packed program schedule[1] with highly weighted name like Mr. Sam Pitroda.

    One of the very useful things was govt. was involved in this conference. Govt's positive approach to get things done in opensource way was very motivating to opensource contributors. Hoping this will go further ahead and we will get major contributions from government in each opensource project like FUEL.

    Another point was most of the opensource contributors from well known organizations were present. It was really great to see all of them. Having Anivar from SMC in conference was very useful. He given very useful comments in most of the sessions.

    I am sure attendees now have clear understanding of complexities of Localization industry and hurricane task done by the communities over the years.

    Though first day Keynote speaker was not able to attend, Satish Mohan and Mahesh Kulkarni very nicely motivated the audience and educated them regarding FUEL efforts.

    I liked Zanata session from Ani Peter. Features available in Zanata project are really good. Specifically liked the feature of allowing two translator chat while working on same project and decide on words choice. Question from audience regarding having localize instance of Zanata was really well worth.

    Rajat Gupta session on "Towards generation of translation memories from varied file formats from distributed/unorganized data" created interest in audience regarding how can they use there different format localize data to create translation memory.
   
    Talk by Ms. Sushma Chitta on "Application of Simplified Technical English in globalization of the content." was interesting. The guidelines of  Simplified Technical English (STE) was nice. I am not aware regarding any such open standard.

    Rahul Bhalerao Ex-Red Hatter  explained the importants of understanding target audience thoroughly before doing translations.
   
    Good part from the  conference perspective was audience was very vocal and attentive.

    It was good meeting Karthik, mostly interacted with him on bugzilla and mailing list. He presented on WMF activities on i18n sides. Also good to Goraji after long time, i remember we worked together for fixing sorting issues in glibc. Looking forward to see some more contributions from him.

    Dinner was good had nice discussion with Mr. Pavanaja U B he told how he started developing open type fonts during 2001. (That time i was doing my first year of engineering ;)). He promised help for Lohit2 Kannada development.

    Had a nice conversation with Omshivaprakash. We were discussing about bug in gnome-shell [2] Tested it today but not able to reproduce same. Was happy to see one more gnome-shell fan. :)

    Arjuna Rao Chavala talk was nice and his interest in improving Indian language uses across communities is impressive. Though English is important as a business language i am sure people will not forget there language. Easy to use basic i18n components are key factors.

    Twitting was good experience in this conference with gang :)

    Second day keynote by Mr. Sam Pitroda was great. He provided information regarding National Translation Mission and also emphasized on point that Machine translation is required to handle huge data.

    Talk by Mr. Guntupalli Karunakar on "Indic fonts: Guidelines and Standardization" was well taken, i am sure Lohit2 [3] will solve number of issues presented by him.

    Anivar explained importants of targeting mobile devices for Indian languages. Lots of work needed to happen in that domain.

    Enjoyed interaction with audience during my talk on IME's evolution. Good part was audience included highly experience localization people and same time there was developers working on i18n components and last but not the least the student/freshers wanted to learn as much as they can. I am sure that audience understood the problem and soon we will have my new proposed IME architecture available everywhere. Lots of expected from me, hoping will try to do it.

    Panel discussion was good. We saw good scope for further development of FUEL. Though at sometime we were loosing direction Ankit did well to keep focus on FUEL only.

    Soon one can get presentations pdf and also videos of talk recording on youtube. I missed Dr.  Nagarjuna G during this conference as he is the one who bring me to Indian language computing and opensource.

    I would like to end this blog by thanking Rajesh, Ankit, Chandrakant for organizing such a nice conference. Expecting some more next time :)


1. http://www.fuelproject.org/gilt2013/program
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1005471
3. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html