An ode to Punjabi

TECHNOLOGY: A personal initiative leads to a spell-check, font-conversion package in Punjabi.

Here's a tribute to the Punjabi language from a Punjabi writer, publisher and photo artist "" Janmeja Singh Johl. He has come up with a first-of-its-kind Punjabi spell-check and Punjabi font converter.

It has been a 17-year-long labour of love for the spell-check programme "" "It was in 1989 when this idea struck, and I started the feeding of words into the database. All these years, I made a database of more than 5,11,000 punjabi language words", says Johl.

The font converter has been 11 years in the making, given that there are more than 400 different fonts of Punjabi in 39 keyboard layouts, informs Johl.

While the spell-check will be welcomed by all users of the language, the Punjabi font converter "" which converts the Punjabi text in one font to any other desirable font "" will be especially useful to the various publishing houses as well as newspapers, since it will create a uniformity of Punjabi fonts.

Johl is yet to fix a price for the programme which, he says, was not developed with a commercial objective in mind. "People have offered to pay me as high as Rs 10,000 but I have installed it for free at many places," he informs.

Whatever the final price that is decided, he intends to continue some services for free. One of them will be font conversion to any of the options for any file sent to him at contact@janmejajohl.com .