Dhvani Now Speaks Marathi

 Posted on June 25, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Thanks to Rahul Bhalerao , he wrote the Marathi module for dhvani– The Indian Language Text to speech System. Dhvani can speak 10 Indian languages now: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. Rahul also gave some patches for hindi module and for some other bugs. The code is available in CVS. The automatic language detection algorithm will not work for Marathi since it uses the devanagari script and I have assigned the unicode range used for language detection to Hindi. [Read More]
dhvani 

Canonical Equivalence in Unicode: Some notes

 Posted on June 3, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Some Notes on Canonical Equivalence in Unicode: Unicode defines canonical equivalence as follows: From UAX #15 Canonical Equivalence This section describes the relationship of normalization to respecting (or preserving) canonical equivalence. A process (or function) respects canonical equivalence when canonical-equivalent inputs always produce canonical-equivalent outputs. For a function that transforms one string into another, this may also be called preserving canonical equivalence. There are a number of important aspects to this concept: [Read More]
unicode 

Firefox spellcheck bugs…

 Posted on June 3, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Firefox spellcheck feature requires some volunteers to fix the

tokenization issue. There are two bugs related to the tokenization

  1. Bug 434044 – The tokenization of words for spellcheck is wrong when there is a ZWJ/ZWNJ/ZWS in the word. – Reported: 2008-05-16 07:49 PDT by Santhosh Thottingal
  2. Bug 318040 – Spell checker flags words containing full stops (periods) Reported: 2005-11-28 12:45 PDT by Joseph Wright
firefox 

Apt on the Road

 Posted on May 30, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Could not get a big one, since I was taking this from a bus while overtaking this vehicle.

apt  fun  picture 

10 GB /var/log/messages file

 Posted on May 28, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Again fedora! 🙂 After the installation of linux kernel and linux operating system, I installed some libraries, some small applications that I usually use… I have a partition for Fedora 9 with 14 GB size. After installing all those softwares, when I rebooted the system today, the gdm was not starting. GDM kept on restarting and I could not take a user session by pressing ALT + CTRL + F1. hmm… So added single at the kernel argument in the grub, and got the shell. [Read More]
fedora 

Linux Kernel in Linux Operating System.

 Posted on May 21, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Last night I decided to try out the new Fedora 9. I got the ISO image and I did not want to waste time and CD by burning it. I have Debian Lenny in my laptop. So edited the grub configuration and gave the path to the vmllinuz and initrd.img extracted from the iso image. Everything worked fine and it started installing packages and I was watching the blue progress bar with sleepy eyes… [Read More]
fedora  gnu  linux 

Bug in Firefox Spellcheck

 Posted on May 19, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

There is a bug in Firefox in the spell check functionality that affects many Indian Langauges using Zero Width [Non] Joiners in the words. Firefox uses hunspell as the spelling checker. Openoffice also uses Hunspell. The bug is not there in Openoffice and problem with firefox is with the tokenization of words in editable textfields before doing spellcheck. Firefox splits the words if there is ZWJ/ZWNJ in the word. And because of this the input to the spellchecker is wrong and it is not the actual word. [Read More]
firefox  spell checker 

മലയാളം, യൂണീകോഡ് 5.1, ഫോണ്ടുകള്‍…

 Posted on May 13, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

യൂണിക്കോഡ് 5.1 പുറത്തിറങ്ങിയ വിവരവും, അതില്‍ മലയാളത്തിലെ ഇപ്പോള്‍ ചില്ലുകള്‍ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്ന രീതിയ്ക്കു പകരം അറ്റോമിക് ചില്ലുകള്‍ ഉള്ളതും അറിഞ്ഞിരിക്കുമല്ലോ. ഇല്ലെങ്കില്‍ അതിനേപ്പറ്റി ഇവിടെ നിന്നു വായിക്കുക. അറ്റോമിക്‍ ചില്ലു് യൂണിക്കോഡില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിനെപ്പറ്റിയുള്ള ചര്‍ച്ചകളില്‍ സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് ഉന്നയിച്ച വിയോജിപ്പുകളില്‍ ഇപ്പോഴും ഉറച്ചു നില്‍ക്കുന്നു. സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് UTC യ്ക്ക് സമര്‍പ്പിച്ച ഈ ഡോക്യുമെന്റില്‍ വിയോജിപ്പുകള്‍ പറഞ്ഞിട്ടുണ്ടു്. ഇതിനെപ്പറ്റി നടന്ന ചര്‍ച്ചകളുടെ ലിങ്കുകള്‍ ചിലതു് ഇവിടെ നിന്നും വായിക്കാം. മലയാളത്തെ ഡുവല്‍ എന്‍കോഡിങ്ങിലേയ്ക്കും സുരക്ഷാപ്രശ്നങ്ങളിലേയ്ക്കും തള്ളിവിടുന്ന ഒരു സ്റ്റാന്‍ഡേഡ് അനുസരിക്കേണ്ട ബാദ്ധ്യത സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങിനില്ല. സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് ഭാഷയ്ക്കു വേണ്ടിയാണു്, യൂണിക്കോഡിനു വേണ്ടിയല്ല നിലകൊള്ളുന്നതു്. [Read More]

Open Letter to Mammootty from Free Software Community

 Posted on April 20, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

Microsoft will be signing up Malayalam movie star Mammootty as one of the brand ambassadors for the Computer Literacy programme that is to be organized soon in Kerala. FOSS community writes an open letter to Mammootty to Reconsider Promotion of Microsoft and their Proprietary Softwares.

It is available here: An open letter to Mammootty. I request all to endorse Open letter to Mammooty by adding your name there.

A nice post on ILUG-TVM on the issue: Another of M$’s dirty tactics

Community  foss 

Using Inkscape for DTP in Indic Scripts

 Posted on April 11, 2008  |  Santhosh Thottingal

A good page layout package for GNU/Linux with Indic language and unicode support is one of the missing item in the list of software packages for Indic computing. Scribus gives hope but it is still not ready to serve the purpose. So what could be the solution? Should we wait or find out ‘workarounds’? No, There is a solution. Till scribus is ready with indic support Inkscape will help us. Inkscape is not a DTP software, but it can do it if required. [Read More]
dtp  Indic  inkscape