Nvu – Urdu Support

Nvu, the open source WYSIWYG web editor now supports Urdu, thanks to CRULP.

We are pleased to announce the release of the Urdu Nvu Windows Installer developed by the Pakistan Country Component of PAN Localization Project (funded by the IDRC) at the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP), National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences ( NUCES).

Nvu is an open-source, multi-platform, complete web authoring system featuring WYSIWYG editing of pages and integrated file management via FTP, which can be used for easy and quick content development. The current release of the Nvu localization includes the Urdu Nvu installer for Windows, which has it’s GUI in Urdu. Work to be done for future releases includes changing the layout direction of Urdu Nvu to right-to-left.   For download and installation details, please go to Urdu Nvu Windows Installer.

Quality of Local Tech Reporting

The quality of the technology related journalism in the local press has been questionable for obvious reasons. Having a number of good friends in many local media outfits, I can say with confidence that none of them have any dedicated technology reporters or journalists. This excludes those who actually work for technology magazines like Spider and Netmag. This lack of technology reporters results in reports that are poor at best and grossly incorrect at worst.

Consider, for example, this news item in today’s The News International. The report starts off with an incorrect title – calling MNP a PTCL issue rather than a PTA issue. That is not all, the report actually presents the scenario as if the MNP thing was some wire that suddenly got snapped and ‘has failed’. Using the words fail or failed repeatedly, the reports gives an impression as if the failure has been officially concluded by someone and that the feature is about to be taken back.

Quite misleading if you see how some of the companies are actively using MNP to their advantage.

A better reporting would have shed lights on both success and problems of MNP and would have talked about as to how the unawareness amongst the subscribers and incorrect or unavailable subscriber documentation are major problems in wide adoption of MNP.