IndLinux Blog

IndLinux is having Project day at FOSS.IN/2007 on 5th December

Schedule for PD is

5th December

Morning
10:00 - 10:45am - IndLinux PD: Introduction and Indic Status - G Karunakar
10:45 - 11:15am - Understanding Indic - Ramkrishna Reddy
11:15 - 11:30am Tea Break
11:30 - 12:15pm - Indian Language spell checking - Gora Mohanty
12:15 - 1:00pm - TeX / LaTeX in Indic languages: Status and the Road ahead - C S Yogananda

1:00pm - 2:00pm - Lunch Break

Afternoon
2:00pm - 3:00pm - Dhvani - Indian Language TTS- Demo, Adding language support - Santosh Thottingal
3:00pm - 3:15pm Tea Break
3:15pm - 4:15pm - A Crash course on Speech recognition using CMU sphinx to build ASRS - Shyam K
4:15pm - 5:00pm - Facilitating Indian language users on FOSS platforms - Gora Mohanty
5:00pm - 5:45pm - BoF - Planning, How to contribute, participate
5:45pm - 6:00pm - Conclusion & closure

For all fans of bolnagri , it just became easier (goodbye scim!).
bolnagri map is now being combined into the common Indic xkb map.. so
it will be available always & directly selected through traditional
keyboard selection tools of GNOME & KDE etc.

For the impatient.. download
http://code.indlinux.net/frs/download.php/10/in.txt

& do the following (as root)
# cp in.txt /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/
# cd /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols
# cp in in.orig
# mv in.txt in
(all this will not be needed to be done in future, once the map is
included into Xorg, then it will always be available, not needing a
separate install!)

then just open your keyboard applet and select ‘India’, in which
select ‘bolnagri’ & follow usual keyboard switching shortcuts (Left
Alt+Shift) or which ever is set.

Note: matras come by default when using ( a, e ,i , o , u ), use it
with Right Alt + key or Shift + Right Alt + key to get the vowel
for ओ - Ralt + o , for औ - Shift+Ralt+o

New deb package for bolnagri released, for Debian Etch and
derivatives. Should also work on Ubuntu 6.10/7.04
this takes into account the recent changes in location of xkb maps in
Xorg.

available in FRS
http://code.indlinux.net/frs/?group_id=8

Thanks to Kartik Mistry for building package.

IndLinux and Indic localization would not have been possible without the support of the following organizations in different capacities.

FreeOS.com was founding organization and incubator for IndLinux through 1999-2001.

IndLinux Project has been hosted on SourceForge.net since Sept 2000.

Netcore Solutions has supported IndLinux activities since 2001.

Sarai-CSDS has been long time supporter since 2002.

NRCFOSS AU-KBC is sponsoring server hosting for IndLinux.org and Code repository

Apart from this are several others individuals, organizations in different capacities who shared our vision of Indic Computing on FOSS.

From IndLinux Sponsors.

Prasad from Swecha writes Swecha team at TCS (Vignesh, Harshita) have
been working on porting the Padma Firefox extension to PHP, so that it can be used server-side as a proxy server. The proxy is available at http://uni.medhas.org/

Check it out and if possible link to it from your websites (Target is to get the search engines index the unicode versions of Indian language websites - thats the reason for listing out all the supported websites on http://uni.medhas.org)

Vignesh writes more about it

What is Unicode Conversion Gateway?

This is a proxy server. When you visit web pages through this server, it will convert the proprietary encoded contents in those web pages into Unicode contents. A mozilla plugin called Padma is extended and reimplemented to create this proxy server.

How to access this Unicode Conversion Gateway?

Use this Url: http://uni.medhas.org

What are all the websites that it’s going to support?

There is a list of website names in the index page (http://uni.medhas.org) for them the contents can be converted.

Why do we need the conversion to unicode?

If the web pages are in unicode,
* single unicode font per language is sufficient to view all the web pages
* search inside a web page is possible
* search through google is possible
* the contents can be copy pasted and mailed to somebody

Why is Unicode Conversion Proxy needed when Padma is available?

Padma is specific to mozilla and firefox web browsers. Since Unicode Conversion Gateway is a proxy server, one can access this through any web browser. Also we have added support for two more proprietary encodings used in http://thatsmalayalam.oneindia.in and http://thatskannada.oneindia.in web sites. We are planning to add support for more encodings also.

What is the development status of the code?

It is converting the pages reasonably well. But still it needs to be improved. We are doing that.

Some of the indic xkb maps have been updated, as per the bugs here
http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/InscriptBugs, mainly removing the invalid chars existing in kan, ori, ml, tel & tml maps..

updated maps are in CVS here - http://indlinux.cvs.sourceforge.net/indlinux/indic-im/xorg-xkb/

they will be pushed upstream into xorg & debian xkb package soon..

The proposed Indic Meet stands abandoned, due to lack of encouraging response & initiative.
This doesnt meen there wouldnt be any meet in future, only that the usual annual september indic gathering wouldnt happen this year.
Anyone welcome to take initiative to plan & organize events in future…

Swecha team has put up a web interface for English Telugu Dictionary at http://www.swecha.org/dict

The interface is in Telugu Unicode unlike most other online dictionary
lookup services. It is based on Charles Philip Brown English-Telugu
Dictionary, available under GPL at
http://ltrc.iiit.net/onlineServices/Dictionaries/Eng-Tel-DictDwnld.html

IndLinux IRC meet on 22nd May 3pm-6pm IST on #indlinux at irc.freenode.net

Agenda:

• Formation of the Indlinux Society
• Update’s from the Language Teams
• Indic Developer Meet - Possible venues