Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka

[Naena Guru]

I made a presentation demonstrating Dual-script Singhala at National
Science Foundation of Sri Lanka. Most of the attendees were government
employees and media representatives; a few private citizens came too.

Dual-script Singhala means romanized Singhala that can be displayed either
in the Latin script or in the Singhala script using an Orthographic Smart
Font. It is easy to input (phonetically) using a keyboard layout slightly
altered from QWERTY. The font uses Standard Ligature feature <liga> of
OpenType / OpenFont standard to display glyphs of Sanskrit ligatures as
well as many Singhala letters. The font is supported across all OSs:
Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iOS and Android. Dual-script Singhala is the
proper and complete solution on the computer for the Singhala script used
to write Singhala, Sanskrit and Pali languages. The same solution can be
applied for all Indic languages.

The government ministries, media and people welcomed it with enthusiasm and
relief that there is something practical for Singhala. The response in the
country was singularly positive, except for the person that filibustered
the Q&A session of the presentation that spoke about the hard work done on
Unicode Sinhala, clearly outside the subject matter of the presentation.

The result of the survey passed around was 100% as below (translated from
Singhala):

   1. I believe that Dual-script Singhala is convenient to me as it is
   implemented similar to English - Yes
   2. Today everyone uses Unicode Sinhala. It is easy and has no problems -
   No
   3. The cost of Unicode Sinhala should be eliminated by switching to
   Dual-scrip Singhala - Yes
   4. We should amend Pali text in the Tripitaka according to rulings of
   SLS1134 - No
   5. Digitizing old books is a very important thing - Yes
   6. We should focus on making this easy-to-use Dual-script Singhala
   method a standard - Yes

Please comment or send questions.
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