Projects

One year back I wrote about how to use Inkscape as a workaround solution for DTP in indic scripts. Still we don’t have any DTP software which supports Indic scripts in Unicode. Scribus still does not have the Indic support. One issue with inkscape when used as DTP for indic script was, a few indic scripts always wanted hyphenation when text is justified. For example Malayalam has lengthy words and often space is wasted in lines if the text is not automatically hyphenated. But this feature was not available in inkscape. There is a wishlist bug for adding this feature to Inkscape. I tried to develop an extension for Inkscape to achieve this. ...

Openoffice Indic Natural Language group announces the availability of the following Openoffice hyphenation dictionary extensions. Malayalam Hyphenation Rules version 1.2 Kannada Hyphenation Rules version 1.1 Bengali Hyphenation Rules verson 1.1 Hindi Hyphenation Rules version 1.1 Telugu Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Tamil Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Gujarati Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Panjabi Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Oriya Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Marathi Hyphenation Rules version 1.0 Spellchecker extension for Malayalam is also ready. ...

[Please read the Silpa project annoucement before reading this blogpost] Project silpa is getting ready for a 0.1 version. The web framework got many changes to support JSON based RPC calls from external applications. That means, web/desktop applications can use the APIs of Silpa through RPC calls. Page rendering logic is moved from server to client. Web interface use javascript based synchronous JSON based RPC calls to get the results from server. Jquery is used for render the page. Uses PyMeld Templating Engine for modules having web interface(Not all modules will not have web interface) Framework is now Python WSGI application. Initially it was plain CGI. WSGI reduces the response time and allows the server to be executed as daemon Many new modules are getting added- Spellchecker : which is not based on aspell or hunspell and I am going to try out some algorithms to get optimal suggestions. Not completed. Soundex Algorithm- webbased demo and APIs as I explained in my previous blog post An Inexact search algorithm and its implementation based on visual and phonetic distance between two words is getting ready. I will explain it in another blogpost Hyphenation – Online tool as well as APIs N-gram for Indic languages– API, web interface API documentation is going on, but not completed. I have plans to make silpa as a python library for offline use too. Moved from SMC‘s git repo to a seperate git repo. After 0.1 baseline, I will create branches for stable and development. Application is running on a git controlled deployment workflow. Thanks to Joe Maller for nice documentation on this. That’s all for now!. There are too many things to be done. Some of the modules does not support all languages as of now. If anybody interested in contributing to the project, please contact me. Try out the application, read the code and let me know your comments.

Many of my friends already know about a project I am working on, this is a public announcement of that. The project is named as Silpa, may be an acronym of Swathanthra(Mukth, Free as in Freedom) Indian Language Processing Applications. It is a web framework and a set of applications for processing Indian Languages in many ways. Or in other words, it is a platform for porting existing and upcoming language processing applications to the web. ...

ചങ്ങാതിമാരേ, കേരളത്തിലെ രസകരമായ പ്രാദേശിക ഭാഷാ ഭേദങ്ങളെക്കുറിച്ചു് നിങ്ങള്‍ക്കെല്ലാമറിയാമല്ലോ? തിരുവനന്തപുരം, കോട്ടയം, തൃശ്ശൂര്‍, ഷൊര്‍ണ്ണൂര്‍, പാലക്കാട്, കോഴിക്കോട് കണ്ണൂര്‍, വയനാട് തുടങ്ങി നമുക്കു് വ്യത്യസ്തങ്ങളായ മലയാളത്തിന്റെ രൂപഭേദങ്ങളുണ്ടു്. അച്ചടി മലയാളത്തില്‍ നിന്നും വളരെയേറെ വ്യത്യസ്തമാണു് അവ. അച്ചടി മലയാളം കൊടുത്തു് സ്ഥലത്തിന്റെ പേരു കൊടുത്താല്‍ ആ പ്രദേശത്തെ മലയാളത്തിന്റെ രീതിയിലേക്കു അതിനെ മാറ്റിത്തരുന്ന ഒരു സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ രസകരമാവില്ലേ? അത്തരത്തിലൊരു ശ്രമമാണു് “ക്ടാവ്” Slang converter എന്നു പേരിട്ടിരിക്കുന്ന പ്രൊജക്ട്. ഇതിന്റെ കൂടെ കൊടുത്തിരിക്കുന്ന സ്ക്രീന്‍ഷോട്ട് നോക്കൂ. ഡെവലപ്മെന്റ് പതിപ്പിന്റെ ചിത്രമാണതു്. കുറച്ചു നിയമങ്ങളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തില്‍ Natural Language Processing ന്റെ പുതിയ ശാഖയായ AMP(Ambiguous Language Processing) എന്ന വിദ്യ ഉപയോഗിച്ചാണു് ഇതു ചെയ്തിരിക്കുന്നതു്. Qt/C++ ആണു് കോഡ്. UI ചെയ്യാന്‍ Qt Creator ഉപയോഗിച്ചു. ...

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): ...

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-). The soft hy­phen is rep­re­sent­ed by the char­ac­ter en­ti­ty ref­er­ence ­ (­ or ­) ...

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. But only for small scale works. There is a project going on to add Harfbuzz backend to Scribus, the freedomware DTP package. ...

A new version of Dhvani -The Indian Language Text to Speech System is available now. The new version comes with the following improvements/features Support for 11 languages- Hindi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Marati, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil , Malayalam and Pashto(Afganistan) Pitch and Tempo modification for speech Direct ogg-vorbis speech output and optional wav output format C/C++ APIs for applications to use dhvani as a shared library. Generic driver for Speech-dispatcher and Integration to Orca through speech dispatcher Python binding through speech dispatcher Improved language detection algorithm Dhvani documentation is available here. ...

A few weeks back there was a discussion on #indlinux IRC channel about automatic language detection. The idea is, spellcheckers or any language tools should not ask the users to select a language. Instead, they should detect the language automatically. The idea is not new. There is a KDE bug hereand Ubuntu has this as an brainstorm idea. It seems M$ word already have this. A sample use case can be this: “While preparing a document in Openoffice, I want to write in English as well as in Hindi. For doing spellcheck, I need to manually change the language rather than the application detect it automatically” ...