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Making Legacy Digital Content Accessible at Source

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Nearly three decades have passed since the Unicode standard was first published in 1991. A lot of electronically generated content is still locked inside legacy encodings. This can be attributed to lack of software support for Unicode at the time of content creation. The target output originally was print and this went on unnoticed. Later, to meet the growing demand for digital content, the same content in legacy encodings had to be exported to unsearchable PDF's/EPUB's. Conversion to Unicode has been a challenge because digital publishing applications cannot provide built in conversion support for the multitude of legacy encodings. Conversion tools, even where available, are external to the source application and require manual effort not only for text export/import but also for correcting errors in conversion and changes in document layout.
We have tried to address this problem for Devanagari script where the digital publishing application is InDesign[1] or PageMaker and the textual content is in the form of text and not images. InDesign allows import of PageMaker documents and InDesign's scripting allows access and modification of the document content directly. The tools have been successfully used to convert legacy Devanagari content from 5 distinct legacy encodings in over 100 textbooks meant for K-12 schools in India.

References

[1]
Adobe InDesign, https://www.adobe.com/in/products/indesign.html
[2]
InDesign Font Converters, https://github.com/assistech-iitdelhi/InDesignFontConverters
[3]
Scripts sorted by categories for InDesign, http://kasyan.ho.com.ua/scripts_by_categories.html
[4]
Scientific & Technical Hindi, https://sites.google.com/site/technicalhindi/home/converters

Cited By

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  • (2020)ASSISTECH: An Accidental Journey into Assistive TechnologyA Journey of Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems10.1007/978-3-030-47487-4_5(57-77)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2020

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W4A '19: Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference
May 2019
224 pages
ISBN:9781450367165
DOI:10.1145/3315002
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2019

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  • Refereed limited

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W4A '19

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W4A '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 49 submissions, 37%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)ASSISTECH: An Accidental Journey into Assistive TechnologyA Journey of Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems10.1007/978-3-030-47487-4_5(57-77)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2020

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