Projects

This post is some notes on the current state of SVG Fonts. SVG is not a webfont format. The purpose of SVG fonts is to be embedded inside of SVG documents (or linked to them), similar to the way you would embed standard TrueType or OpenType fonts in a PDF. SVG fonts are text files that contain the glyph outlines represented as standard SVG elements and attributes, as if they were single vector objects in the SVG image. Unlike EOT, WOFF, TTF formats , SVG is plain text uncompressed file. ...

Malayalam Wikisource community today released the first offline version of Malayalam wikisource during the 4th annual wiki meetup of Malayalam wikimedians. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a wikisource project release its offline version. Malayalam wiki community had released the first version of Malayalam wikipedia one year back. Releasing the offline version of a wikisource is a challenging project. The technical aspects of the project was designed and implemented by myself. So let me share the details of the project. ...

I am just back from Mediawiki Berlin Hackathon. On May 13 to 15, Mediawiki developers attended the hackathon and squashed many bugs and discussed many features. Members of language committee had its first real-life meeting in parallel with hackathon. It was a nice event, learned a lot, talked to many awesome hackers and linguists. Milos Rancic has written a summary of the discussions happened during language committee meeting here : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-May/065537.html Niklas Laxström and Siebrand reviewed the WebFonts extension and enabled at translatewiki.net. Fixed a few bugs that Niklas reported on the extension. Purodha Blissenbach was very much interested in the WebFonts and Narayam extensions, we discussed some of the features we need to add. We have it here: Bug 28900 , Bug 28999 and Bug 29000

Sourashtra is a language spoken by Sourashtra people living in South Tamilnadu and Gujarat of India. Originated from Brahmi and then Grandha, this language is mother tongue for half a million people. But most of them are not familiar with the script of this language. Very few people knows reading and writing on Sourashtra script. Sourashtra has a ISO 639-3 language code saz and Unicode range U+A880 – U+A8DF Recently Sourashtra wikipedia project was started in the wikimedia incubator : http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/saz and Mediawiki localization started in translatewiki Since the language did not have any proper fonts or input tools, this was not going well. ...

A demo of cross language approximate search in Indic text: The Malayalam word സാമ്പാര്‍ is compared against a paragraph from http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar. In the bottom half, words marked in yellow color are search results. You can see that a Kannada word ಸಾಂಬಾರ್‍ is matched for Malayalam word. And that is why this is called cross-language. The inflections of the words സാമ്പാര്‍ – സാമ്പാറും, സാമ്പാറു etc are also found as results. This is the kind of search we need in Indic languages, not just the letter by letter comparison we do for English. ...

Recently we released two Jabber buddy bots for dictionary lookup. By adding [email protected] as a chat contact one can ask for the meaning of an English word in Malayalam by just sending a chat message. Similarly for English-Hindi or Hindi-English dictionary, we have another bot [email protected]. Both of these dictionaries use Dict databases based on DICT protocol. Both of these bots were well received by the users. We have 8000+ users for English-Malayalam Dictionary. Online blogs/media also gave good publicity. Thanks a lot!. ...

I left Chennai on Wednesday(8th) and reached Frankfurt airport on Thursday morning. Rest of the people from India for wikimania- Shiju Alex, Tinu Cherian, Srinivas Gunta, Arjun Rao were already reached the airport and I joined them. We reached Gdansk Airport by 12.30 PM. Our accommodation was at a students hostel of Gdansk University. Language was a big issue since most of the people does not understand English and only know Polish Language. The lady at the reception of the hostel we stayed was using Google translate tool for communicating with us. The Gdansk city is a very beautiful city with streets of big brick made tall buildings. ...

I will be attending Wikimania 2010, Gdansk, Poland. This annual international conference of the Wikimedia community is from July 9 to July 11. I will be presenting wik2cd, the tool I wrote for Malayalam wikipedia version 1.0 there in a joint workshop with wikipedia offline developers. I will be joining with Manuel Schneider, Shiju Alex, Martin Walker in the workshop titled: Creating offline version of Wiki content – Solutions and Challenges. Apart from this, I will be meeting pediapress team, the team behind wikipedia’s latest PDF/Book export feature. There are some issues in this tool for working with Indic languages, mainly because of the PDF rendering engine not capable of rendering complex scripts. ...

As part of Malayalam Wikipedia Meetup 2010 , today Malayalam wikipedia releases 500 selected articles on a CD ROM. This is the first time in India, a Wikipedia on local language releasing its articles for offline usage. I handled the technology part of the project. The idea was to get the selected articles in static form to the CD. But this is not easy as we imagine. It is not like saving each page from browser to the local machine. Following were the challenges: ...

A few days back I came to know about this project :Text Prediction on GNOME based on GTK+ Input Method context. Basically it is an input method with text prediction feature. I had a similar project idea during 2009 May and had done some amount of coding for that. The project was to have an IBUS input method which can do letter prediction as well as word prediction. The prediction is based on ngrams. Since it is based on ibus, it works on all desktop applications. You can see the screenshots of prototype from here, here and here ...