Friday, October 07, 2005

Displaying ਪੰਜਾਬੀ in web pages

I had been thinking it would be a good idea to share my experience of displaying gurmukhi on web pages . After Gurpreet.kaur's recent enquiry in a comment in my last post I decided to do this sooner than I might have otherwise done.

Well, it took some searching and rummaging through the internet, but the keyword would appear to be something called UNICODE. In a nutshell, take any text written using a gurmukhi font, convert it to unicode, and you're ready to publish.

So how do you convert to unicode? The Punjabi Computing Resource Centre web site has developed a Gurmukhi Unicode Conversion Application which you can download. If you're in a hurry and want to straight to the download page then click here.

I'm no expert on this subject, I'm using windows XP professional and am not sure wether this will work for other platforms. One other word of caution, if you get an error message when trying to install/run the unicode conversion programme then you will have to install something called Microsoft .NET Framework, which can be downloaded from here.

Once you've got the unicode conversion programme working the it's simply a matter of pasting your gurmukhi text and clicking on the convert button. The second window will now display the text in 'unicode gurmukhi' which you can copy and paste into your web page.

Perhaps other more experienced 'techie' bloggers would like to comment and offer further help and advice.

3 comments:

msingh said...

Just wondering wether you've asked sukhmani how she does it, maybe she has an easier way?

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ricky said...

those boys at punjabi computing resource center just don't get as much pub as deserved. they're doing an awesome job.

msingh said...

I agree with you isingh, I think there are many sikhs out there who are doing really good work for the cause of sikhi and punjabi.

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