Re: [Indic-computing-devel] javascript indic renderer and community portals

[Suryaprakash K. <kom...@ce...>]

Hello,

> A good, generic transliteration library for the Indian
> languages/scripts is what is needed, IMHO. As anyone
	So, what kind of a standard are we planning to
use for the transliteration itself?


> In a web-based client-server model of app development,
> unlike Latin scripts/languages, it would be more
> appropriate to do input processing, transliteration
> and glyph composition for rendering on the server
	True in the current scenario, but why in the
long run?? We can create engines to do this, something
like say-flash - If you want to view falsh based content,
you need flash to be on your machine (client side) -
similar way - if you need to view Devanagari text -
install our XYZ (preferably opensource) package, and any
website that conforms to these standards will be able to
display Devanagari to you. This will allow -
A central body to easily make modifications to how the software
behaves, instead of individual websites having arbitrary
control.
	A (ServerSide) JScript + (ClientSide)Java based solution might
allow us to come up with a quick fix to do something like this. And at a
subsequent time, we can do away with the quick fix and develop our own
packages to deal with any kind of character rendering or input schemes.
(option buttons, password entry, input boxes etc.)

> side. So, using Javascript may not be that feasible to
> achieve this. At the same time, if all processing is
> on the server side, then the application can't be
> really that interactive (such as showing the display
> to the user for each syllable typed in). Some

		This is exactly what I am hinting at -
It might be difficult to get instant results in the short
term - but in the long term, a client side solution would
help.

> intermediate soluton would be needed. Also, using PHP
> may be a better idea than Javascripts or jsp. What do
> you folks think ?
> A couple of weeks back, I made an enhancement to my
> transliteration library (translib under the
> indic-computing project on sourceforge) to take a
> 'word' in an Indian language encoded as a sequence of
> Unicode characters (in UTF-8 format), kind of map it
> (using a user-defined lookup mapping file) to the most
> appropriate Roman phonetic input and then apply the
> transliteration rules for that language+script by
> looking up the transliteration rule file. The output,
> as before, is a sequence of symbolic glyph names that
> correspond to glyph indices in a given font file. This
> can be fed to a font reading and rendering library
> such as freetype2 for final display (Koshy wrote a
> python script to do this using gozer, but he is now
> replacing gozer with a python wrapper to ft2).

	I have done the transliteration to unicode part
for devanagari - for a tool we use for our research work.
If someone sheds light on the transliteration scheme
being used, I could help.

> I tried out this utf8-to-final-glyph rendering for
> Hindi+Devanagari with very minimal mapping done and
> did some prelim testing and it's ok. All the
> intelligence is in the user-defined mapping files and
> the source code itself has no knowledge of any Indian
> language.
	Yes, I agree....

> Unicode is neither an input mapping scheme nor a glyph
> mapping scheme; it's just an encoding scheme, as all
> of us know. It has limitations, but with a sound
> transliteration library in place, utf-8 can be used
> for
> storing Indian language content for further processing
> (search, sort, display etc etc).
	We are using unicode encoding for such purposes and
I am in the process of developing a query and retrieval
system using the same scheme (for the tool mentioned
earlier)

	However, There could be some misinterpretations
on my part, I think I need to brush up on the
activities in our group. I have been working on Indic
Computing for a short while, but I do not know where
to get technical-info about the various ideas/projects that
everyone is posting here - If there is a web-site(s) from
where I can get more info, it would be gr8. I did not
notice info about the translib project at -
http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/projects/index.html

	And, is there a pdf verion of the handbook?
http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net/handbook/index.html
This site had some circular links - but I did not find the
pdf version.
Thanks,
Surya
  __       __
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  __|urya |rakash |\ompalli

Email - kom...@cs...
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