| Indian Language DTP |  |  |
 Dataflow was the first ever company to
introduce a complete, real-life, full-fledged DTP package capable of
typesetting Indian regional languages and printing them on Lasers.
The product, Devyani, introduced in 1986, was timed just years
after reasonable quality laser printers started to appear on the
computer scene.
Surely, before this, people had made attempts to display Devanagari
and other languages on computer screens and print them on the Dot
Matrix printers. But, these attempts were mostly for demonstrative
purposes. Dataflow's solution resulted in a real product,
with a complete, typesetting quality font containing as many as 234
Devanagari characters. Coupled with a full screen editor capable of
showing all these characters properly at a much lower resolution and
a full set of typesetting commands (almost similar to the set
popularised by the CompuGraphics typesetters), it allowed real jobs
to be composed using an ordinary PC. The continuously variable font
sizes, from 1 point (barely larger than a dot) to more than 800 points
(one character per A4 sheet) meant that the real typesetting had
arrived on the PC, as opposed to the crude Dot matrix printouts in
one or two sizes.
Also, this totally indigenous solution was completely software based:
It did not require any modifications to the PC, no hardware cards were
used for the display of Devanagari on the screen. There was no need to
change the keyboard either, the standard PC keyboard was utilised to
produce all the graphic shapes required to produce complex conjuncts
for the Indian languages.
The developments continued from Devanagari to cover rest of the Indian
languages, such as Gujarati, Oriya and Assamese in the very next year.
Next few years saw the frenzied activities to produce DTP packages for
the remaining Indian scripts: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam,
Gurumukhi, Bengali, etc. A real breakthrough occurred in 1989, when
Dataflow first introduced, for the first time in the world, Urdu DTP.
Dataflow's Urdu has been widely acclaimed as a superb implementation
on Nastaliq script on the computers. Contrasting to Nasque, the linear
style used typically for Arabic, Nastaliq has characters within a word placed at
multiple levels; both are right - to - left.
Producing an excellent quality
typeset document in Urdu, an hereto unachieved feat was made possible
after this program was introduced. The language which could only be
written by hand had been computerised. The grace and beauty of Urdu
had been captured so that every one can write with a style that takes
a dedicated calligrapher several years to achieve.
Dataflow's Windows based softwares for Indian languages, introduced in 1992
opened up the use
of many standard, off the shelf programs with the regional scripts.
Devkey is our standard product for using Devanagari fonts
with almost all Windows based products.
More info about Devyani and related products is here.
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