![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/42dd7dfbe784fdc74010c75ac7a3d12d.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Dear readers, With great joy and a sense of relief I can now announce that my latest book, _A Manual of Modern Kannada_ by Robert Zydenbos (Heidelberg / Berlin: CrossAsia E-Publishing, 2020), a teaching manual of the Kannada language (Kannada belongs to the Dravidian family of languages, mainly spoken in southern India; also in the city of Bangalore, the 'Silicon Valley of India') has been published. It is an Open Access publication, which means it is available as a gratis download in PDF format from https://crossasia-books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/xasia/catalog/book/736 (the clickable button “Buch herunterladen” means “Download book”; “Buch kaufen” means “Buy book”, for those who want a real book on paper). I was working on this book for the past few years and decided that the only affordably sensible way to achieve presentable results would be to use TeX, but plain TeX was too cumbersome, and in LaTeX the tables were difficult (and the book has many, many tables in various shapes and sizes). ConTeXt was The Solution (and has been duly mentioned in the technical note at the end of the book, with special thanks to Hans, Wolfgang and Pablo for valuable suggestions). For those who are curious how I used ConTeXt MkII with the XeTeX backend, a sample chapter is available at http://e.pc.cd/XlhotalK (and then click on "Direkt herunterladen"). Robert Zydenbos