A shop worker arranges Tibetan-language books at a store in Lhasa. [Photo: Xinhua]

When Tashi Tserang was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the United States four years ago, there was nothing he loved more than chatting on MSN with his friends in his native Yunnan province.

Their conversation was mostly in the Tibetan language, but, much to Tashi's frustration, not all of his friends could take part at the same time - they were all using different software to input the Tibetan language, which led to problems with compatibility.

"Businesses in China have been enthusiastic about designing software for inputting the Tibetan language since the 1990s, and a dozen of them have succeeded and put their products on the market," Tashi, who is now building a "digital library" for the China Tibetology Research Center (CTRC) in Beijing, said.

People can use the input software to chat on MSN and QQ - a popular Chinese instant messenger service - as well as the programs available from Yahoo and Gmail.

The input programs also work for word processing and other office software, and some mobile-phone users in the Tibet autonomous region can also send short text messages in the Tibetan language.

The only hitch has been getting all the programs to work together.

"The companies have been grabbing market share and speeding the programming process, so compatibility is not their concern, and no one follows the basic standard of Tibetan information technology - unicode," Tashi said.

When he was in Virginia, Tashi was determined to design a "small and cute" program that would bridge the divide between the different Tibetan language input software. He started his project at the university and continued it after he returned to China.

He had a lot of work to do: Organizations and companies based both inside and outside China have designed more than 20 different Tibetan software systems based on different encodings. Five of them - Founder, Huaguang, Tongyuan, Pandita and Sambhota - are widely used in China.