About
What this site is about
ilug-cal.org publishes on how free software arrived in India, and what had to be built for it.
The interesting material is institutional rather than ideological. Localisation came first and was hardest: Indic scripts need complex text shaping — reordering, conjuncts, matras — which is why Unicode, the shaping engines and the Indic font work matter more here than any desktop argument. Government procurement did the rest, in documents that are public and specific.
The site is organised in four sections. Code Points covers what a character actually is, and what the encoding standards do and do not decide. Shaping covers the layer between stored text and the screen. Standards covers ISCII, Unicode and the negotiation between them. Procurement covers the tenders, the distributions and the school deployments.
The four sections
- Code PointsOne code point, then thirty years — What a character actually is.
- ShapingThe head-line problem, and the layer built to solve it — Shaping, conjuncts and why rendering is hard.
- StandardsTen scripts, one table — ISCII, Unicode and the standards fight.
- ProcurementThen somebody had to write it into a purchase order — Procurement, schools and the state.
Every claim on the site is attributed to a published standard, a project’s own documentation or a government notification, and the links go to the source.