Announcement: vEngi font for viewing Telugu in netscape

Ramana R. Juvvadi (juvvadi@horizoncomp.com)
Thu, 3 Oct 1996 14:12:56 -0400 

Yes. You can view Telugu in netscape now. Not as an image where it
can take forever to download. You can read Telugu as "text".

Checkout http://cygnus.horizoncomp.com

I put mahaprasthanam and all the Satavadhanam poems posted 
on the net. You need unix, X windows, and netscape-3.0 to
see the demo

Here is the front page of the demo web site

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Lekha Home Page

Welcome to Lekha web site. This is still under construction. This site
is just meant to demo lekha technology. We will put together a Telugu
Web site with lot more material soon.

I just hacked together a new X font called vEngi. The history of the
font dates back to 1992. In those days Ananda Kishore and Rama Rao
Kanneganti wanted to write a Telugu editor in Motif.  The editor never
materialized but a great deal of the font work was done by Kishore at
that time. I finished Kishore's font and rescaled it. There is lot of
scope for improving the look of the font.  But the font is mainly
designed for a screen font and not intended as a high quality print
font like pOtana or anu font. The purpose of vEngi is to facilitate
distribute information in Telugu script.

I also added programs to lekha to display telugu directly in
netscape. Instead of downloading telugu script as image we can now
download telugu as text. This helps slow connections considerably.

The lekha software can convert RIT (RTS to be more precise) text into
a webpage viewable in Telugu with the help of vengi font.

Instructions for installing the vEngi font: 

    1.Make sure you have Netscape 3.0. Netscape-2.x series doesn't work. 
    2.Download vEngi-1.0 font into your home directory 
    3.tar xvf vengi-1.0.tar 
    4.xset fp+ $HOME/vengi-1.0 
    5.xset fp rehash 
    6.At this point, if you do 'xlsfonts| grep telugu' you should see
       a list of five vEngi fonts.
    7.Restart netscpe. 
    8.Check out the demo Shatavadhanam . Shatavadhanam contains
       poemsfrom recent New York SatavadhAnam. They consist of 
       the poems I copied from the net. I want to warn
       that while I did some proof reading there could be still lot of
       typos. Also check out a simpler demo, Sri Sri's Maha Prasthanam

You don't have to install lekha software, if all you are interested in
is reading material that is put out in Telugu fonts.

I would like to document the lekha software better, but if you are in
a hurry Download lekha.tar.gz. Any help on this is greatly
appreciated. Right now, there is no way to view Telugu in Windows/Mac
as text. I will try to add Windows/Mac support as soon as possible. I
would like to thank Rama Rao Kanneganti for his constant help, passion
for writing free software and encouragement. If not for Arun Kumar
Gupta's expertise on Mac there would have been no hope of ever porting
lekha to Mac. I would also like to thank Kumar Vadaparty, and Suresh
Kolichala for their suggestions and support.

Ramana