Lesson 5

The Typing Tutorial

BharatVani Hindi Typing Tutorial has been designed in two parts. The first and second parts will prove useful for the students who wish to learn reading, writing and speaking Hindi and who have already learnt reading and writing in Devanagari script.

The second part is for the students who, for age, impatience, or any other reason, are averse to trying their hand at Devanagari script. If you are one of them you may skip the next few lessons and go directly to Writing Lesson #__.

The lesson assumes that

1. you are comfortable with English keyboard

2. you have installed at least one BharatVani Hindi font on your computer

3. and you have installed a template for special characters in Word for Windows. (Fonts and templates are included on this CD ROM).

While designing a keyboard layout for BharatVani fonts we had two options –

1. to follow ISCII code (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange – developed by the Bureau of Indian Standards), or

2. assign Hindi consonants, vowels and numbers over their phonetically similar and universally understood English keyboard.

To make life easier for BharatVani students, touch-typists and millions of non-professional Indian computer users, we selected the second option, rather than compelling them to learn an entirely unfamiliar and cumbersome ISCII code.

Devanagari script is used for writing Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, and Nepali languages. The keyboard assignment as shown on the next page is same for all BharatVani fonts included on this CD. These keysboard assignment will work the same in all Windows supported word processors and other programs. All you need to do is select your preferred BharatVani Hindi font from the font menu of the program you want to work in. (for easy viewing and till you get comfortable with your Hindi typeface we suggest you select larger than normal point size.)

Here is an important note about your browser. Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) may not recognise special Hindi characters which we have assigned to extended ASCII codes. Instead showing the Hindi characters IE5 may show English symbols. To overcome this problem, go to the 'VIEW' menu of IE5 and select 'USER DEFINED' encoding.