Pandita means "learned scholar" in the Tibetan language, and Sambhota comes from the name of Thonmi Sambhota, the seventh-century scholar and official who, according to Tibetan legend, invented Tibetan writing at the order of King Songtsen Gampo (AD 569-650).

Microsoft, Apple and Linux all have their own software for processing the Tibetan language, and similar programs have also been designed by companies in the UK, Japan and India. Compatibility problems are rife.

The different kinds of software offer more than 30 different fonts, although Tibetan writing has more than 60 fonts, Tashi said.

"You can easily judge the quality of a Tibetan-language software from the fonts offered. The good fonts are neat and pretty," he said.

Tashi's software, called Universal Tibetan Font Converter, can now make about 10 kinds of Tibetan encodings compatible with each other, and he is working to include others.

His software is widely used within the Tibetan community, and he is using it to build a digital library at the CTRC, which has a collection of more than 100,000 books about Tibet in the Tibetan, Chinese and English languages.

Many of the Tibetan-language books in the collection were published in the past five decades, Samding Tserang, the deputy chief librarian, said.

They include 261 sets of ancient documents that have been re-published, he said.

"We want it to be more convenient for researchers to use our books and also ease access for scholars as well as people outside the research center who are interested in Tibet. So we want to build an online catalogue of our books and put the content in afterwards," the librarian said.

Samding and his colleagues have made a Tibetan-language catalogue of all the books in the collection and are using the software to shift from the Founder input system to Microsoft Vista, which is based on Unicode Tibetan.

They are using the Wylie Transliteration system to spell the Tibetan book names in the library management software. But in the near future, they will switch their data to Tibetan characters by using the converter developed by Tashi.

"What Tibetologists need most now in their research is an international standard for Tibetan information technology, which is in Unicode," Samding said.

"After all, we want our digital library to be frequently visited by Tibetologists everywhere and to aid communication," he said.

(China Daily May 6, 2008)