I came back this morning from San Francisco after presenting a paper Extending Gurmukhi Script to Twenty First century and beyond at Sikholars – First Graduate Sikh Conference held on February 20, 2010 at Stanford University Campus. I had coauthored the paper with Amanpreet Singh Brar.

The manuscript pdf of the paper can be downloaded here. Schedule pamphlet can be downloaded from here and here

Update March 6, 2010 : As the unrooted phone does not allow change in the phone ROM, this would only run on rooted phone. Here are five reasons why you should root your phone. One way to do it, is listed on CyanogenMod wiki.

I use Google G1 running Android OS for my email. To enable Punjabi on android I used the following steps

1. Download a Unicode Punjabi font.
2. Copy this font to your sdcard and rename it exactly DroidSansFallback.ttf.

Now start Terminal Emulator and type exactly (watch the Case) the following commands, followed by enter.

su (then wait for the superuser screen and press yes)
mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
chmod 4755 /system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf
dd if=/sdcard/DroidSansFallback.ttf of=/system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf
reboot

Voila you should be able to read Hukamnama and emails written in Punjabi.

Thanks to Droidbot for the idea

What is interesting is that only Indic languages that were included in the Firefox 3 Official release were Gujarati and Punjabi. Even Hindi, the largest spoken language in India, could not make it due to lack of motivated volunteers.

Kudos to Amanpreet Sing Aalam and the whole Punjabi Team.

Want to contribute?

What should you do?

• Shift to Linux or Leopard
• Use Firefox. On my Mac Book Pro, it showed the popup, but did not download the spyware, compared to Safari which did download the spyware. I would love to hear from windows Firefox users about their experience though.