Archive for January, 2009

I have always been interested in typing in Indian languages on computers, but wanted it to be as easy as typing the equivalent in English and have it transliterate dynamically. Alas, due to the complexity of indian languages and the variation in how people type the equivalent in english, it is hard for that method to be reliably correct all the time.

That method however seems to be called RTS by most folks in the know of such things. I created a custom dictionary file for my Pidgin Instant Messenger that lets me type in Hindi by using the Text Replacement plugin. You can just download my version of the dict file and replace the one in the settings directory of your Pidgin installation – and enable the Text Replacement plugin. And voila – you can be typing in Hindi on IM too! And since most IM clients show international characters correctly, the people on the other side do not have to be using Pidgin to be able to see your Hindi. In fact, it works great on gmail’s version of GTalk, and even Fring on the iPhone! Here is my Pidgin Text Replacement plugin Hindi Transliteration dictionary

And to type in Indian languages on my blog, I am using the Indic Input Extension firefox extension. It supports RTS method of input in most languages, but also supports WX – which is very close to RTS, but just uses capital letters for the stronger version of a letter (k is क and K is ख). And it is called WX since only W and X are different than what is obvious – त is w and द is x. The other thing that took me a while to figure out was how to get half characters like त् – the answer is _ – the underscore key allows you to shorten the character just before it. This allows you more control over how the word is displayed. And it allows you to switch between English and the Indian language with just a Ctrl+Space. Beautiful!

In Thunderbird, my email client, unfortunately the above plugin is not available. So I use the Indic IME plugin. The only downside with the Indic IME plugin is that it does not support RTS. So you have to use the WX notation with Indic IME. Since the RTS is kind of unreliable on what it spits out, getting used to WX for Indian languages is probably the best option anyway.

The Thunderbird IndicIME plugin has it limited to versions 2.0a1. I edited the file to make it work on Thunderbird versions that are current. Indic IME Plugin modified for Thunderbird version 2.1

So here is the WX notation in Telugu

Telugu WX notation

And MozDev hosts a version of the Hindi WX notation

Image: Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net