Web Samhita
Web-Samhita makes use of component based technology to provide the composing in Indian languages. By making use of the components provided in Web-Samhita it is possible to create static or dynamic interactive HTML pages. I.e. pages in which the user is required to key in something in Indian languages. The most prominent browsers currently being used worldwide are Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). For Netscape Web-Samhita provides Plugins and for MSIE Web-Samhita provides ActiveX control. These components provide support for all Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Web-Samhita also provides functional interfaces to control. For typing, the user can choose his own keyboard layout from a wide range of keyboard layouts available along with the package. Also some functional interface has been provided to control the aesthetics and the properties of the components using Scripting languages such as JavaScript or VB Script. .

Client Side conversion

Text written in Indian languages cannot be sorted automatically as is in English. This is because it is nearly impossible to incorporate all the possible combinations of characters in the ASCII range available. Because of this discrepancy, if sorting is required the text written in font codes must be converted to ISCII (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange). The components provided in Web-Samhita provide the conversion to ISCII automatically. In fact the user has a choice of extracting the default text in ISCII codes or Font Codes. Font Codes are useful in cases when you don't need the facility as in the case of Addresses or Narration. ISCII codes are mandatory if you want sorting according to the Indian languages as in cases of Names of people, places, states and so on. There are no APIs involved as the components have the intelligence of doing the necessary conversion

Server Side APIs for Conversion

Server side conversion APIs are provided as part of Web-Samhita in the form of Java Package for servlets and JSP and COM automation servers for ASP. These APIs are required for converting a set of records to Font codes or ISCII codes.

Installer Utilities.

If a site has been developed using external tools and components, it may not come up properly, if the external components are deleted or removed from the system. To cater to this, Web-Samhita provides installer utilities for installing the various files in the client's machine. This installer validates whether the required files are present in the clients machine and if not present automatically downloads the file from the site. These installers are in the form of Plugins for Netscape and Automation Server for MSIE.

Dynamic Fonts

Dynamic fonts are special kind of fonts, which are automatically downloaded on the client's machine whenever the site is visited. Dynamic fonts are required to view text composed in Indian languages since composing requires special vendor specific fonts. Dynamic fonts can be used for developing web sites, which do not have user interaction in the form of composing in Indian languages. These dynamic fonts can be both in the case of static and dynamic web pages.

Download Size

The size Web-Samhita download is very small. Once downloaded the components reside on the client's machine and are not required from the next time onwards.

System requirements

On the client side, Web-Samhita works on any Window based machine be it Win95 or Win98 or WinNT. The components can be kept on Unix/Linux based server and can be accessed on the client side.