(by Diwaskar Chettri & Nikhil Pahwa) Bangalore based Reverie Technologies has developed an Indic language framework for digital platforms including mobile phones, Digital TV and PCs, covering Indic language rendering on digital devices, enabling text entry, and providing custom fonts, predictive text, dictionaries and bilingual messaging solutions. Arvind Pani, Director (Business Development) for Reverie Technologies told MediaNama that though their solutions are platform agnostic, at present, they're eying mobile handsets and Set Top Boxes (STB) due to the scale that the mobile and television media have achieved in India, but are also looking at all kinds of handheld and billing devices used to generate bills in multiple languages. They compete with US based Bitstream and Monotype, with C-DAC in the fonts and rendering segment, and with QuillPad, Google, Nuance, Webdunia and Eterno in transliteration. Display & Rendering: Key Issues Pani says that several digital devices, including handsets, may be capable of receiving data in Unicode, many of them do not have the capability to render that Unicode and support fonts in many languages. On DTH and IPTV, the company isn't looking at providing TV channels with display solutions for text, for example, for tickers, but looking more at the electronic programme guides which are currently delivered in English. There are phones available in 4-5 languages, some with 8-9 languages but the usability aspects are very very low, and they're unable to give the same user experience as in case of printed text. One of the issues is that Indic languages are conjunct, and not…
