Fwd: Next FOSS Ka KURA (FKK) on January 9, 2009

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Dec 26, 2008, 12:43:14 PM12/26/08

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bal Krishna Bal
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 2008 20:43:01 -0800
Subject: Next FOSS Ka KURA (FKK) on January 9, 2009
To: foss-...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Jacob Nordfalk <jacob.nordf...@gmail.com>

Dear All,
This is an invitation to you all to the upcoming FOSS Ka Kura (FKK)
which is
being organized by Madan Puraskar Pustakalya (MPP). Please find the
details
of the programme below:

Topic: "Formatted Nepali Text Conversion"

Venue: Yala Maya Kendra, Lalitpur, PatanDhoka
Date: Friday January 9, 2009
Time: 4 P.M - 5 P.M

Presentation of a new Open Source tool for i.a. converting mixed
Nepali
documents using Nepali fonts/from to Unicode.

The converter is in several ways revolutionary in comparision to what
exists
right now:

VERSATILE:
- Supports formatted (OpenOffice) documents natively, and HTML, RTF
through
plugins.
- All formatting (font size, underline, italic,...) is kept intact.
- Not limited to text, but also spreadsheets, presentations etc can be
converted.
- Mixed text with Nepali and non-devanagari (English) text can be
converted
(i.e. documents using mixed fonts Preeti, Arial, Kantipur, Courier,
etc are
converted correctly, with all formatting intact)

USER FRIENDLY AND EASY:
- much more user friendly than existsing tools. F.eks. user does not
need to
know about or specify text encodings
- clipboard conversion
- conversion tables are kept in user friendly spreadsheets (one for
each
font), which an (educated) user can maintain even with no programming
skills.

Jacob Nordfalk is a Danish programmer and assistant professor in CS,
is
living in Nepal, Kathmandu and have i.a. written 3 books about Java
programming (http://javabog.dk).

The project is 80% complete and available from
http://code.google.com/p/nepaliconverter/ . It will be a big step
forward
for Digital Nepal... if volunteers are found to take over and finish
the
project before until April 2009, when Jacob moves permanently to live
in
Denmark.

The talk will present how the (Java) converter is working. Knowing
some Java
is fine, but there are other activities (transliteration schemes and
font
conversion tables and quality assurance/testing, use case analysis
etc)
where just general computer knowledge is required to contribute to the
project.