KDE Indic Screensavers

 Posted on December 22, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I ported all of the Matrix screensavers with Indian language glyphs to KDE4. For details about the screensavers please read: Hacking the GLMatrix screensaver Screensavers in your language Download the binary packages: Deb package, and RPM package There are 6 screensavers in that package, for Malayalam, Hindi, Oriya , Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati. After installation, goto KDE system settings->Desktop->Screensaver and select any of this. Screenshots(click to get the image in original size): [Read More]
hack  kde  screensaver 

Hyphenation of Indian Languages in Webpages

 Posted on December 17, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

In my last blogpost I explained hyphenation of Indian language text in openoffice. In this blogpost I will explain how hyphenation can be done in webpages. As I explained importance of hyphenation come into picture when we justify the text. The length of the lines are controlled by the parent tags…. Unicode had defined a special character called soft hyphen for hyphenation denoted by ­ . In HTML, the plain hy­phen is rep­re­sent­ed by the “-” char­ac­ter (- or-). [Read More]
hack  hyphenation  javascript  web 

Hyphenation of Indian Languages and Openoffice

 Posted on December 14, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

What is Hiphenation? Hyphenation is the process inserting hyphens in between the syllables of a word so that when the text is justified, maximum space is utilized. Hiphenation is an important feature that DTP softwares provide. For Indian languages there is no good DTP softwares available. XeTex is the only choice to work with unicode and professional quality page layout. But xetex and DTP are not exactly same. Inkscape can be used as temporary solution. [Read More]
hack  hyphenation  openoffice 

Gedit plugin for showing unicode codepoints

 Posted on November 12, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

While working with Unicode text, it is often required to get the Unicode code points of text for debugging. Using python, it is very easy to get the unicode codepoints of the text. Following examples illustrates it. ` “സന്തോഷ്”.decode(“utf-8”) u’\u0d38\u0d28\u0d4d\u0d24\u0d4b\u0d37\u0d4d’ ` or ` str=u"സന്തോഷ്" print repr(str) u’\u0d38\u0d28\u0d4d\u0d24\u0d4b\u0d37\u0d4d’ ` Well, But we need to take python console and type/paste the text etc..How can we make it more easy? What if pressing F12 key after selecting some text gives the codepoints? [Read More]
gedit  hack  plugin 

Screensavers in your language

 Posted on October 27, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

I had written a blog post about hacking the glmatrix screensaver with the glyphs of our languages. Now I have those screensavers in the following languages: Hindi : Deb Package , RPM Gujarati : Deb Package , RPM Bengali : Deb Package , RPM Oriya: Deb Package , RPM Tamil : Deb Package , RPM Malayalam: Deb Package , RPM Try it and enjoy !! ps: I used the default fonts of Fedora 9 for these. [Read More]
hack  screensaver 

say_namaskaar.c

 Posted on July 27, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

/* say_namaskaar.c * This is a sample C code using dhvani text to speech API which I am * developing now and planning to release soon. New version of dhvani * will provide a shared library libdhvani and it allows other C or C++ * applications to use dhvani synthesizer. Tamil and Marathi modules, pitch, tempo * control etc are the features for the coming release. * I need to prepare documentation, fix many bugs, test, commit the files in cvs . [Read More]
dhvani  hack 

Can’t Speak? Dhvani will speak for you!

 Posted on March 17, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Dhvani can help not only blind users but also dumb users. I will explain how dhvani act as your mouth using KMouth. Kmouth is as KDE Accessibility Appllication and it act as a test to speech front end. KMouth is a program that enables persons that cannot speak to let their computers speak. It includes a history of spoken sentences from which the user can select sentences to be re-spoken. It learns the words the user wrote and have autocompletion. [Read More]
dhvani  hack 

Dhvani – KDE Integration.

 Posted on March 17, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

It is possible integrate Dhvani Indian Langauge TTS to KDE desktop through its TTS system KTTS. Using this you can dhvani can read the text in kate,kedit,kwrite, Konqueror. You can even listen to the text in the webpages in Konqueror Dhvani can be itegrated to KTTS using its Command plugin feature. To do this go to control center–>Regional and Accessibility –>Text-to-speech –>Talker Tab. Add a new Synthesizer. Select the syntesizer type as Command and Langauge as Other. [Read More]
dhvani  hack 

Creating audio books using Dhvani

 Posted on February 28, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Dhvani can be used for creating audiobooks in any of the supported languages(Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Panjabi). First of all you should get the latest dhvani source code from CVS in sourceforge. Compile it and install. To create an audiobook follow these steps You need the text in utf-8 format. No need to specify the langauge. Dhvani will detect the langauge automatically. <br /> dhvani -o audiobook.wav textfile<br /> oggenc -B 16 -C 1 -R 16000 audiobook. [Read More]
dhvani  hack