In 2007, I attended FOSS.in, a FOSS convention in my home city of Bangalore.  I was fresh out of college, armed with book knowledge and a lot of confidence, but little else.   The suggestion to attend FOSS.in was made by a senior colleague who had some working knowledge of FOSS.  It was supposed to give us a glimpse into the working of the FOSS world.  It did, but it was a lot like trying to drink water from a fire hose pumping out at full blast!  I tried to soak up as much as I could while filing away things for later perusal.  Some of those filed entries were automatically consigned to trash over the years.  Some stayed.  One of them was a talk by Professor Yogananda of SJCE Mysore who had developed a LaTeX package for transliterating English into Kannada.  However, the package doesn't just stop at transliterating.  It's got 'hooks' built in to automatically supply the correct Kannada equivalent for various native LaTeX components of a document such as 'Chapter', 'Preface' and Table of Contents, numbering for pages and list items etc.  In short,  it's does what no other software to my knowledge offers:  an easy way to have a document completely in Kannada. You can paste Kannada unicode text into a Microsoft Word document for instance, but what you can't get is Table of Contents, Chapter environment and numbering, all done in Kannada, automatically! The table of contents for instance will have to be hand-crafted and will have to be updated manually each time the document changes even marginally.  The Sagar package however does all that by providing the relevant values to the underlying LaTeX system which is ultimately responsible for generating the final document. You can find out more information about the project itself through this presentation: http://www.sirinudi.org/Sagar/sagar-project.pdf

Who can use this software? Anybody who wishes to typeset documents entirely in Kannada: the author needs to only concentrate about the contents; the structure is handled by Sagar and LaTeX.  Potential users are schools which may want to create 'Question Papers' in Kannada, institutions such as banks and government agencies which may need to create various forms in Kannada, writers who write in Kannada and wish to typeset their works in the most aesthetically pleasing manner possible. It can also be used to typeset wedding cards, greeting cards, bumper stickers, sign-boards… the list is endless! The combination of Sagar/LaTeX means you can get your artwork/book/document in pdf format with the greatest of ease and provide it to a printer/publisher and get it to look exactly the way you designed it. Here's the first 'bumper sticker' I made.  It's a verse by Basavanna, a famous Kannada poet/philosopher from 11th century AD. Roughly translated, this verse means:Speech should be like a pearl necklace Speech should be like the fire of rubies; Speech should be like a string of quartz crystals Speech should make even the statue of God to nod in agreement. However, the Gods don't appreciate speeches on goodness when one is not good from within.

Like to know more on how you can use Sagar? Stay tuned!  More coming up.