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Welcome to the home of Brahmi - THE source of Open Source OpenType Kannada fonts and Java based Input Methods since 2002. Since then our fonts have found their way to most of the Linux distributions including Ubuntu. We hope you find this useful. All the components of Brahmi are released under GNU General Public License. Please read the license terms before using the software.
Brahmi was initiated as a small part in the Indian Language Technology Solutions (ILTS) project at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India. ILTS is a part of the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme initiated by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), Government of India. For more information visit - https://www.tdil-dc.in/. Since our product supports all the major Indian languages that are descended from Brahmi Script, we named it Brahmi.
The Brahmi project aims at producing Java Input Methods and OpenType fonts for Indian languages. Hence Brahmi consists of the following software
- Brahmi Indic Input Methods
- Brahmi OpenType fonts
- Brahmi Word Processor
The highlight of the project are the Java Input Methods and the OpenType fonts for Indian languages. However, Brahmi Word Processor is just a demonstration program for the Input Methods and OpenType fonts.
Currently, Input Method and OpenType font - Mallige and Kedage for Kannada are being released. We plan to make few more releases of the OpenType font, Mallige, Kedage and the Brahmi Kannada Input Method. We also plan to support other Indian languages in our future releases and start related projects. You can use the Brahmi Kannada Input Method to input Kannada text in Unicode format in your Java2 programs and the Kannada OpenType font Mallige and Kedage, to display Unicode based Kannada text. You can download at the Downloads section.
You can subscribe to the project mailing list brahmi-users (at) lists.sourceforge.net by visiting the following URL :
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brahmi-users
Few lines about Brahmi Script:
Brahmi script appeared in India most certainly by the 5th century BC, but the fact that just like the Greek alphabet, it has many local variants, which suggests that its origin lies further back in time. It is in this script that the great Indian king Asoka inscribed his laws onto monumental columns. The earliest real documents written in Brahmi date back to the 3rd century BC, and already then there existed several varieties of it. Brahmi quickly became the official script of religious texts and cults, and therefore spread over all India. At that very time another script, Kharosthi, was spreading in the country, but Brahmi finally prevailed.
The Brahmi script was the ancestor of all Indian writing systems, including the Devanagari. In addition, many Asian scripts, such as Burmese, Thai, Tibetan, and even Japanese to a very small extent (vowel order), were also derived from Indian script. Thus the Brahmi script was the Indian equivalent of the Greek script that gave arise to a host of different systems.
For more information on Brahmi Script visit http://www.ancientscripts.com/brahmi.html
The below figure shows the Brahmi alphabet.
