Building a page with Indic scripts using Unicode- II
Input Method Editor (IME)
Most of the Indian languages have more words, than what can be fitted into keyboard keys. To allow for users to input Indic characters, several Input Methods (IM) have been devised to create Input Method Editors (IME). The term IME originated in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Other operating systems may have a different name for the same idea. These days when an operating system is prepared for use in India, it always has one or more IME’s built in, to make it practical for users to input their characters. However, applications sometimes provide their own input methods as well, which may provide alternative input strategies or which may be better suited to that particular application.
Web based services
These days there are few websites that offer free translation of text from English to and Indian script, or translate them from one Indian language to other. The good thing about them is, the output of these online applications are based on Unicode, so all you need to do is type in your text , translate it to your language, copy the output text, paste it in your web page. Most of these online applications may not be online for ever and most of them are small scale websites that may not support huge traffic. Here are a few of the websites that are doing this great job.
- Devanaagarii
- IIT.edu
- Padma
- Lekini (telugu conversion only)
These applications might be very useful for designers/ writers who are not on their own system, or who don’t want to install any software.
Application based
There are few applications available in the market that is used to convert and encode multiple languages. Few of them are free applications others are not. They are often similar in function with IME’s, and can also be joined in the IME group without any harm. Here are a few of those applications that are mostly used currently.
- Yudit, this application supports almost 50 languages and outputs the text in many formats like RTS, Unicode, etc. just type in the text, copy paste the output in your webpage.
- Baraha
- Aksharamala
Note: these applications are not the only one available, there are few more available that work better or worse than these. It’s not in the scope of this article to list all of them.
Putting into your page
Here’s the part that shows how to show your pages in multiple Indian languages.
For HTML (not usually XHTML), we need to include this information at its top, inside the HEAD element.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
XHTML documents have another: to express the character encoding in the XML preamble, for example
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
The above code should be placed on the top most part of your page, above HEAD, above HTML, even above the DOC declaration.
Useful links
- FAQ – Indic Scripts and Languages
- Enabling complex text support for Indic languages
- BashaIndia windows IME
- Mozilla firefox Indic IME add-on
- Unicode fonts
- VOLT
- wordpress Indicizer Plugin
