Artech India unveiled the latest product of its Akshar series, Akshar Naveen on Linux (ANL), here today. ANL supports all the features of Akshar Naveen on Windows and also comes equipped with an inbuilt database and open document format (ODF) support.

According to Yogendra Tripathi, Country Head and Senior VP, Artech India: "ANL is the extension of our commitment to make Indian language computing available across the board. It is a result of our constant endeavour to spread 'Apni Bhasha, Apni Shaili' computing convenience."

In the true spirit of open source segment of the IT industry, ANL, which is at present available on Red Hat/Fedora, can be ported to different flavours of Linux. With the ability to create PDF directly from an Akshar document, ANL also support GUI in Hindi for specific users.

Launched in 1984, Artech's Akshar series has seen many popular upgrades over the years. While Akshar Naveen on Windows was released to a great appreciation in July 2005; an earlier product in this series (still available in the market), 'Akshar for Windows' (AfW), works as an add-on to MS Office - to enable Indian language computing.

While Akshar Naveen (Windows) eliminated the dependency on any external Office Suite, ANL takes it a step further. "It provides value add to the multilingual computing movement in India," says Tripathi. "We are bringing the Akshar advantage to Linux along with an inbuilt database."

With these 3 multilingual marvels from the Akshar series, Artech India now covers a very wide spectrum of the multilingual computing market - AfW caters to the PCs running Windows 95 or above; Akshar Naveen (Windows) works on PCs running Windows 98 or above; and ANL makes it available on the Linux platform.

A futuristic manifestation of multilingual technology, ANL is ODF compliant. "All documents generated in Akshar Naveen can now be saved in ODF which will allow these documents to be opened and edited in any application that is ODF compliant," says Tripathi.