Hewan Amharic Software
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Hewan Amharic Software is a software company based in Ethiopia. It markets a word processor that conforms to the unicode standard, enabling users to write with the Ge'ez alphabet.
Since the inception of computer technology several scholars and computer enthusiastic tried every thing to apply computer technology in their country and in their language. At first the ASCII standard was the bottleneck for most non-Latin based languages and they created the extended ASCII with the eight bit computing capability. That allowed about 256 characters to be added to the language world. However still the 256 character set did not quench the trust of millions of computer users across the globe. Most Asian languages where using the double bite character set. That solved some problems but it was a big mess. Still other languages were left out side with out help. Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez were the best example where the world never care about their existence. However scholars such as Dr. Adamu Walelign and other were working hard with a limited resource with out side help. They created Amharic fonts and use exited keyboard drivers and were able to print Amharic Newspapers and flyers. Soon few Ethiopian software developers followed their footsteps and developed several Amharic software. It was a painful and exiting journey for both users and developers. One of the hardest things was not having a mutual agreed standard. Each developer were doing his work independently in closed doors with out sharing any thing every thing was disarrayed. People could not view or edit a document which was written by software A with software B. Every thing was hard and frustrating.
All this frustration and pain goes away when the UNCODE standard born. Unicode the 16 bit computing with more than 65K character representation is the savior of our world. Now almost all Amharic characters have their own representation. Now people can post forums, blog, send email and design a web site. Now you can buy an Amharic software which is UNICODE compliant there are several free software and also with fees. [Hewan Software is a best example]
