It was a surprise news that almost ended up being short of a shocker. While Unicode is being adapted increasingly world-wide, our Karnataka Government seems to be heading the other way. The state government issued a notification earlier this week for a possibility of a 'bi-lingual font' for Kannada script.

The worry is not the weird idea insisting on a requirement of bi-lingual font (since we already have multi-lingual fonts in Unicode), it is the state government's decision to stick around with the old encoding in ASCII. While the encoding format is not well supported anywhere else other than the Nudi software (which is distributed as a freeware by the state government), it is definitely not path for the future.