Omshivaprakash | Forklore

Vachana Sanchaya

The Vachana Sanchaya project , a repository of 12th century Vachana literature of Karnataka. The platform allows researchers, students and public to use all language technology tools to research on the literature which still thrives.

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Fonts Sanchaya

Kannada Fonts Showcase (OpenSource, Free etc) to allow the public to choose the best possible font that suits their work. The project highlights the technical viability of the font by showcasing its rendering, complex character usage outcomes, QA results for fonts and more. It also lists the fonts original source, developer and foundry details. Also encourages reporting bugs. This project also highlights the 19th and 20th Century revival fonts developed by Sanchaya.

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Pustaka Sanchaya

Pustaka Sanchaya is a search portal that aggregates over 122,000 Kannada books from digital libraries, personal and private collections, and online bookstores. It brings together books digitized by ServantsOfKnowledge, Sanchaya, and other projects into a single searchable index, with author, publisher, and category browsing.

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Karnata F-Kittel Font

Karnata F-Kittel is a digital revival of a Kannada foundry typeface originally created at Basel Mission Press, Mangalore between 1830-1900. It recreates the historic 'Kannada Long Primer No. 2' style for modern digital use and is named after linguist Ferdinand Kittel in honour of his contribution to the Kannada language.

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Type Test Kannada

TypeTest is a single-page app for inspecting, testing, and comparing Kannada fonts. Users can upload any TTF/OTF/WOFF/WOFF2 font and preview it across curated test tabs covering vowels, consonants, conjuncts, matras and more, with glyph coverage checks and variable font weight controls.

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Font Quality Inspector

Font Quality Inspector checks and reports on the rendering quality of Kannada fonts, helping catch glyph and rendering issues before fonts are published on the Fonts Sanchaya showcase.

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How to support

People can get involved in a few ways: contribute code by opening pull requests on any of our GitHub repos (fonts, digitization tools, dictionaries, transliteration tools, etc.); help grow our book and periodical archives by submitting scans, bibliographic data, or missing entries (e.g. via JSON/data files for Pustaka Sanchaya, Patrika Sanchaya, or author-specific collections); contribute to font development and quality assurance by testing fonts, reporting glyph or rendering issues, or designing new Kannada typefaces; help with translation, transliteration, or proofreading of digitized texts; or adopt and help maintain one of our existing projects long-term. Beyond code and content, people can also support us by reaching out directly at info@sanchaya.org, or contribute financially through our nonprofit partner Sanchi Foundation, which funds server costs, digitization work, and new development.

A small brief about your project

Kannada Language Technology Research & Study Forum ‘Sanchaya’ was born with an intent to make an impact in the area of Kannada & Technology. ‘Sanchaya’ is exploring the possibilities of using technology in Linguistics and Literary research. Tools designed and developed by ‘Sanchaya’ is available for the larger community through Internet and Mobile platforms. ‘Vachana Sanchaya’ is a platform built to enable research on Vachana Literature which is already available for public. We have dreams to build many more such initiatives. Projects binding both Literary & Technology Knowledge through our platforms are based on the inspiration of creating atmosphere around Free Information & Free Knowledge through Free Software. Sanchaya is a not for profit platform working around building the technological capacity around Kannada Literary research.

One FOSS maintainer lesson for your younger self

Start smaller than you think you need to. It's easier to expand a focused project than to maintain. It's a marathon, not a sprint - pace yourself, because the work of preserving a language's literature never really 'finishes'.

Why do you do it? Why do you bother maintaining a FOSS project?

Because it's bigger than me - every book we save, every font we revive, every tool we build for preserving our language outlives any single maintainer. That's worth the years of unpaid weekends.

If your repo had a theme song, what would it be?

Munde Banni - Come forward being told in Kannada!

Which file in your project would you most like to set on fire?

Each project has set a fire to start another one, and the list grows as we keep solving problems. Let's set a fire on the stage to build more linguistic tools to live on.

What's your open-source villain origin story?

Being an introvert never thought I was building, one repo at a time.

If you had to use one emoji to convey what it is like to be a FOSS maintainer, what would it be?

📜