In early 1996 I came across mybangalore.com where I saw Kannada HTML files. When I enquired with the website for an editor to create such documents, I came to know that it was a commercial program and was not free.
I then decided to create my own Kannada editor to make it freely available to everybody. I started working on this in my freetime and in the weekends and the first version Kanvert1.0 was out in March 1997. It was very rudimentory (I can say so now, when compared to the current one). It was used by only few of my close friends
I started implementing the suggestions and gave it a new look to edit the Rich Text Formatted Kannada Text in my editor itself. So the Kanvert 2.0 was released in May 1997 and more of my friends used it and found it to be quite useful.
To make writing in Kannada much simpler, I implemented on the fly trasliteration and also supported other Indian Languages like Hindi in Kanvert 2.1 which was released in November 1997. It is really a very stable and useful version and is the latest available for Windows 95/98/NT. This version is being used and appreciated by many people outside my friend circle.
| Version | Main features | Developed with | Released in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | User had to type Kannda text in English script in the editor and save it as .txt file. Kanvert would convert this .txt file contents to a .kan file containing Kannada characters. This could be then be viewed in Kannda font using another Menu. | VC++ 4.0 | May 1997 |
| 2.0 | Supported MDI documents and saving Kannada text in RTF format so that users can edit them in popular word processors like MS Word. Had a better UI and supported editing the Kannda RTF text within the editor. | VC++ 4.0 | July 1997 |
| 2.1 | In this version users can just type in the text and that will be converted to Kannada on the fly. Also supported Hindi and user could extend this to other Indian Languages easily. This is the Latest version available for Windows. | VC++ 4.2 | November 1997 |
| 3.0 | You will be able to write in Indian languages from within your browser. | Java 1.2 | Feb 2000 :-) |