Gurmukhi on a screen

Getting Punjabi onto a computer took two decades of unfunded work. Early Gurmukhi fonts were non-standard hacks that mapped Punjabi letters onto Latin character codes, so a document written on one system was unreadable on another.

Unicode support for Gurmukhi, standard fonts, keyboard layouts, spell checkers, optical character recognition for printed Gurmukhi, and machine transliteration between Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi were built largely at Punjabi University Patiala's Advanced Centre and by volunteers.

The Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi transliteration matters more than anything else on that list. It means a book published at Lahore can be read at Ludhiana and the other way round, for the first time since 1947, at the cost of a click.

The Panjab Digital Library has digitised millions of pages of manuscripts, newspapers and rare books and put them online.

A language spoken by a hundred and forty million people got its digital infrastructure built by an underfunded university department and a handful of individuals, and it very nearly did not happen.

Gurmukhi has been in Unicode since the 1990s and the practical problems were fonts, keyboards and rendering, most of which are now solved.

Punjabi Wikipedia exists in both scripts and is small. The Gurmukhi one has a few thousand active articles and the Shahmukhi one fewer.

Speech and handwriting recognition for Punjabi lag well behind the major Indian languages, which matters because it is the interface most rural users would actually use.

What we don't know

  • The long-term funding position of both projects.

Where to check this

  1. Panjab Digital Library project records. Panjab Digital Library - manuscripts, newspapers, rare books ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Punjabi University Advanced Centre publications.
  • Unicode Gurmukhi block documentation.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 220 accounts in When the Water Went, the chapter of this site covering Punjab since 1947: land, water, debt and everything after.