Some other issues that needed attention was the standardisation of a keyboard for entering Kannada characters and also to see how Kannada can be used in other software apart from the then existing desktop publishing applications. A Kannada document written and saved using one application could not be opened in the other. The biggest customer for these Kannada software was the Government of Karnataka.2 Each of this Kannada software was developed using a specific format and hence portability of data across applications proved to be difficult.
Shabdaratna was released with an advanced version called Winkey and another editing software called Surabhi was also released.2 In the mid-1990s, Windows started to replace DOS as the operating system of choice as Kannada software began being developed for Windows.
