Font Conversion

Different Punjabi fonts have different keyboard layouts, so the inbuilt font conversion utility of Windows cannot be used to convert the font of a Punjabi text. Akhar provides the inbuilt facility of converting text in Punjabi from one font to another font without any loss of text or formatting information. The font conversion utility supports more than one hundred twenty commonly used Punjabi Fonts and 37 different Keyboard Layouts for Punjabi.


Sorting utility
Sorting and Indexing is one of the basic necessities of the database management system such as maintenance of student’s records or arranging a dictionary in alphabetic order. But unfortunately there does not exist any software for automatic sorting of Gurmukhi words and all such work has to be done manually. The collating sequence provided by UNICODE or ISCII is not adequate, as it is not compatible with the traditional sorting for Gurmukhi words. Gurmukhi, like other Indian languages has a unique sorting mechanism. Unlike English, consonants and vowels have different priorities in sorting. Words are sorted by taking the consonant’s order as the first consideration and then the associated vowel’s order as the second consideration. In addition the properly sorting “characters” in Gurmukhi often requires treating multiple (two or three) code points as a single sorting element. These complexities have been taken care of and a sorting utility for Punjabi text files has been developed. Like the other utilities, the text file to be sorted could be could in UNICODE/ISCII or be font encoded in RTF/DOC/HTML formats as well as plain text files.


 

Flexible search and replace facility for both English and Punjabi
A sophisticated phonetic based find/replace utility specifically for Punjabi has been developed and supported in Akhar. As there is no standardisation of Punjabi spellings, so a word may be written in more than one way. This problem is more acute for some consonants of naveen varga which are commonly written without the dot. Similarly the words containing addak may be written both with addak or without addak and both forms are acceptable. There are many other character pairs also which are often written interchangly. Another problem typical to Punjabi is that the user can type consecutive occurring semi-vowels/upper vowels and half character/lower matra in any order and they all look visually similar. An option for searching all such similar words is provided in the Find/Replace utility. If the option is set on, then all the phonetically and visually similar words are considered equivalent and the program searches and places the cursor on first occurance of any such word.