Open Invitation : FOSS Ka KURA

फ्रि एन्ड ओपन सोर्स सफ्टवेयर कम्युनिटि नेपाल, एउटा यस्तो समूह हो जुन समुह फ्रि एन्ड ओपन सोर्स सफ्टवयेर प्रयोग गर्नुपर्छ भन्ने मान्यता राख्छ । केही वर्ष पहिले स्थापना गरिएको FOSS Nepal Community, नेपाल मा फ्रि एन्ड ओपन सोर्स सफ्टवेयर प्रयोग गर्नुपर्छ भन्ने मान्यता राखेर अगाडि बढेको संस्था हो ।

अब आज उल्लेख गर्न खोजेको प्रसंगमा जाउँ होला । FOSS Nepal Community ले आयोजना गर्ने रेगुलर इभेन्ट अन्तर्गत "फोस का कुरा" भन्ने कार्यक्रम को निमन्त्रणा यहाँ बाट म सबैलाई खुल्ला रुप मै दिइरहेको छु । यहाँहरु पनि यसको बारेमा बुझ्न चाहनुहुन्छ, फोस नेपाल को फ्रि एन्ड ओपन सोर्स सफ्टवेयर आन्दोलनलाई समर्थन गर्नुहुन्छ भने यहाँहरु पनि आउन सक्नुहुन्छ, कार्यक्रम मा । विस्तृत विवरण यहाँ तल दिइएको छ ।

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.

The project is 80% complete and available from Nepali Converter . 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.