Tamilnadu Electoral Rolls

With the State Assembly elections round the corner, the Election commission of India has released a website – containing Tamilnadu Election Rolls in its entirety. This includes all 30 districts in Tamilnadu State and the entire text is in local language (Tamil). This is a remarkable step in transparency and checking bogus entries.

From a technical standpoint few points:

1) The site requires you to download and install a Tamil font to few the website. If you are a Non-Admin user like me, this is a problem. Here is a Windows Trick to get over this. Just click on the Font Download link, when the dialog box that says Open/Save/Cancel comes up, click Open. You will see a window similar to one below, please don’t close it; instead leave it open and then switch to your IE/Firefox window and refresh the page. You should be able to see the text in Tamil. (This trick works because whenver you have a font file (TTF) opened in Explorer, Windows temporarily registers the font. When you close the font window, the font is removed).