Use your computer in hindi

India has adopted the internet and its associated technologies very fast. Many people use various types of services on the internet. But most people are content just using those services, very few individuals are willing to contribute. Although there are many organisations and companies who are developing content for the Indian market, they are also compelled to develop in English language lest there product may not have a pan India appeal. This has led to a lack of awareness about the availability of Hindi as an option in computing. So I’ve decided to list a few options which may help you use your computer in Hindi.

The most popular search engine of the world, Google, is available in Hindi. Just go to google.co.in and click on Hindi below the search box. The popular online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is also available in Hindi. For this you will need to visit hi.wikipedia.org. it has many articles in Hindi, you may also make your contributions.

There are a few dedicated search engines for Hindi language such as hinkhoj.com and raftaar.com. With these you can search online for content in Hindi. The difference between these and Hindi Google is that Google searches only for Unicode fonts whereas these can search for legacy fonts as well.

We often need to translate a few passages in Hindi from English, but we are stuck with a few words of which we don’t know the Hindi form. To help you out there is sabdkosh.com. it thrives on user contributions and has a large repository of words.

Finally we come to writing in Hindi. Although Hindi keyboards are available but in reality they are tough to get.  And even if we get it, it might not be worth it to learn a new layout for everyone as some may need to type just a couple of lines. So people invented the concept of typing phonetically, i.e., you type the word in English as it would sound in Hindi and it gets typed in Hindi. For example, to write भारत you need to type bhaarat or bhArat.

We have two options for using this technology, online options and offline options. One very good offline software is baraha. It has a notepad like editor as well as an application to enable you to type Hindi directly in any application called baraha direct. Download it from here.

Quillpad.in is an online option. Quillpad’s being online has one added advantage, it matches your word with its dictionary before writing it. Thus spelling mistskes are reduced and you also don’t need to follow any rigid code.

Both baraha and quillpad support few other Indian languages also.

Before you try out Hindi, make sure your computer is adequately equipped to display Hindi correctly. For this open control panel and then regional and language options.  Go to the languages tab and check install files for East Asian languages. Then click apply. You will be asked for the Windows XP CD at this point. Insert it and click OK.

You can also transform Windows XP’s interface into Hindi. For this visit bhashaindia.com and download windows XP Hindi LIP. Keep in mind though that for this you will need to have genuine windows license.

It seems strange that I’m writing this article in English. This is because i want to reach to those who are not at all using Hindi language on their PCs. Hindi version of this blog post is also available at http://gouravhi.blogspot.com/2009/07/blog-post.html#links