Input_methods

The Swanalekha transliteration based Malayalam input method is now available in Windows and Mac platforms. Thanks to Ramesh Kunnappully, who wrote the keyman implementation. I wrote this input method in 2008. At those days SCIM was the popular input method for Linux. Later it was rewritten for M17N and used with either IBus or FCITX. A few years later, this input method was made to available in Android using Indic keyboard. Last year, due to requests from Windows and Mac users, Chrome and Firefox extensions were prepared. Thanks to SIL Keyman, now we made it available in those operating systems as well. ...

This is a quick tutorial on installing Mozhi input method in Windows 10. Mozhi is a transliteration based keyboard for Malayalam. You can type malayaalam to get മലയാളം for example. We will use Keyman tool as the input tool. Keyman input tool is an opensource input mechanism now developed by SIL. It supports lot of languages and Mozhi malayalam is one of that. Step 1: Download Keyman desktop with Mozhi Malayalam keyboard Go to https://keyman.com/keyboards/mozhi_malayalam. There you will see the following options to download. Select the first one as shown below. Download the installer to your computer. It is a file about 20MB. ...

Google recently added voice typing support to more languages. Among the languages Malayalam is also included. The speech recognition is good quality and I see lot of positive comments in my social media stream. Many people started using it as primary input mechanism. This is a big step for Malayalam users without any doubt. Technical difficulties related to writing in Malayalam in mobile devices is getting reduced a lot. This will lead to more content generated and that is one of the stated goals of Google’s Next billion users project. The cloud api for speech recognition will help android developers to build new innovative apps around the speech recognition feature. ...

Sayahna Foundation had prepared a single page documentation of Swanalekha input method in PDF format. Since I often get emails about the key mapping, I am sharing it here. PDF: http://thottingal.in/documents/swanalekha.pdf Swanalekha Malayalam input method documentation

Six years back I wrote a javascript version of popular Swanalekha input method. Friends were requesting web based version that they can use in Windows platforms too. Swanalekha was initially written as a SCIM input method and later m17n input method, readily available in GNU/Linux platform. I had provided a bookmarklet version too. Later Rajiv Nair and Nishan Nasir wrote Chrome and Firefox extensions. Yesterday I noticed that the updated Marunadan Malayali news portal using my javascript library to power Malayalam input method in their search boxes. I don’t track who else or how many use these libraries and tools. But I quickly realized how bad the code is. Or in other words, How better I can write them today. 6 years is a long span of time anyway. ...

How to configure Ubuntu 14.04 for typing in Malayalam

Also see Swanalekha input method documentation