Shantanu's Blog

Significance of Indian languages editor:
Baraha can be used as an independent editor that provides basic options for editing documents. Baraha Direct allows users to type Indian languages directly into Microsoft Office products such as Microsoft Word for creating professionally looking documents.

Baraha is a word processing application for creating documents in Indian languages. Baraha is developed with an intention to provide a free software to enable Indians use their native languages on the computers. Baraha can be effectively used for creating documents, sending emails and publishing web pages.

Baraha - which means 'writing' in Kannada, is an Indian language software that converts 'Indian language text written in English' to the respective scripts. The first version of Baraha was released in 1998, with an objective to provide free, easy to use Kannada software, to enable even non-computer experts, to use Kannada in computers.

Later, the Devanagari script was introduced, thereby enabling Hindi, Marathi & Sanskrit users. Today, hundreds of thousands of individuals and organisations around the world are successfully using Baraha for publications, sending emails and creating websites.

About the author:
Sheshadri Vasu, the pioneer of the Baraha software, is a self-made success story. While most people working abroad spent weekends either working over time at office or planning weekend trips, Vasu worked at developing the Kannada software.
Thanks to his diligent efforts, Baraha is today popular not only in Karnataka but also in 50 other countries including the USA, England, Kenya, Gulf countries, Singapore, Germany and several others. And in his own words, over 2,000 new people download Baraha everyday.
Vasu, a Bangalorean employed at ‘First Data Company’, New York, is an Electronics Engineering student and has a Masters degree in Electronics from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

About the software:

• Easy to use Transliteration scheme. Type in English characters and get Indian language scripts on the fly. No learning curve for typing required! Needs the know-how of the English keyboard only.
  
• Supports Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam languages.
  
• Baraha Direct supports typing Indian language UNICODE text into any windows applications that support UNICODE.
  
• Useful for desktop publishing, e-mailing, web-sites in Indian languages.
  Supports exporting text as Text, RTF, UNICODE, HTML documents, and as BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, PCX picture files.
  
• Standalone program for editing, printing documents. Needs no other editors. In addition to the standard formatting features, supports multi-columns, pictures, bullets, indentation, tab-stops, hyperlinks, e.t.c.
  
• Searching the Internet for Indian language words is possible by right clicking on the word in the Output Window.
  

Why Baraha?
The latest version Baraha supports saving the documents in UNICODE format which means you can transfer documents to other operating systems that support UNICODE, such as Linux.

Baraha 6.0 takes Unicode support to the next level and works seamlessly in the Unicode based operating systems. Data can be copied in Unicode format between Baraha and other Unicode enabled applications by a few clicks of mouse.
So, Baraha is not just an ANSI based editor. It is also the easiest way to create Unicode documents in Indian languages. Several Unicode projects have been successfully completed using Baraha.
Baraha users are progressively increasing every day. Baraha website statistics indicate that in the month of July 2004 alone, Baraha 5.0 was downloaded about 3200 times.

In Windows XP and Windows 2000, you should first enable the Indian languages support before you can use Indian language UNICODE. You can enable the Indian language support using Control Panel --> Regional Options applet.

So users don’t be agonized! Your work in Baraha will never become obsolete.

http://www.baraha.com