Bal Krishna Bal of the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) - the Patan Dhoka (Kathmandu)-based principal archive of books and periodicals in Nepali - says that four years ago the institution was at a loss on how to catalogue its collection.

This was then not possible with the help of the existing fonts of Nepali like Preeti and Kanchan. So the MPP simply got involved in developing software in Nepali.

The then existing Nepali fonts lacked data processing facilities like "sorting" and "find and replace".

They also lacked uniformity in terms of keyboard mapping of the Nepali characters, thus making Nepali typing difficult to the general public.

But the needs kept growing. From building data processing facilities for the Nepali language, to building a simplified keyboard mapping, such requirements were clearly felt.

So the MPP undertook a Font Standardization Project, which was assisted by the ministry of science and technology and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in March 2002.

The project's results led to the inception of Unicode in Nepal - an encoding scheme that assigns unique code to every character of standard writing scripts of the world.

Under the project, Unicode compatible fonts like Kalimati, Kanjirowa, Thakwa Robinson, along with two keyboard drivers - the Nepali Unicode Keyboard Romanised and Nepali Unicode Keyboard Traditional - were developed.

With the development of the keyboard drivers (software), Nepali typing has become drastically simple to learn. The development of the Unicode compatible fonts has made data processing possible for the Nepali language.

But this was just the beginning, says Bal, currently the project manager of the PAN Localisation Project at the MPP.

"Owing to the fact that a larger Nepali population is deprived of usage of computers because of the language barrier, with English being the communicating language of the computers, MPP put the objectives of developing an operating system and localised software applications in Nepali," says Bal.

It undertook a 30-month-long PAN Localization Project from January 2004, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, and administered by the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Lahore, Pakistan.

MPP contributed the Nepal component and released the localised operating system NepaLinux 1.0 late last year.

NepaLinux 1.0 is a Debian and Morphix based GNU/Linux distribution.