[Wikimediaindia-l] (OT) On the importance of Unicode

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Thu, February 24, 2011 9:15 am, Nikhil Sheth wrote:
> Great discussion, but I wonder why I didn't see any real, easy, doable,
> inexpensive, quickfix solution put forth that every Indian on the internet
> can begin using immediately to get around the Unicode Vs custom Fonts
> issue.

Nikhil, all those tools you mentioned are for Transliteration based input
methods. And *proprietary* solutions.

But in any modern free desktop distributions - whether it is ubuntu,
debian, fedora or any other distro, you have lot of inputs methods to
select. All of these get installed in default installation itself and you
can choose transliteration based input method or inscript or any input
method which fits our "laziness-to-learn".

And if you are too lazy to learn any key combination, for that also we
have offline desktop based solutions which can do suggestions, give drop
down list of alternatives etc. (see
http://thottingal.in/blog/2008/10/27/swanalekha-m17n-based-input-method-for-11-languages/)
Just give a try on the various input methods available in a latest
GNU/Linux distro for your language. If none fits, let the foss developers
know what exactly you are looking for. You will surely get a solution.



And it is worth to spent some time to learn one standard keyboard layout
for your language. You learned to write(using pen) by spending some amount
of time right? in Kerala, students at 7th standard learns typing in
Malayalam. Once our language syllabus on other languages accept this
model, I am sure that every student will be good in writing and typing in
their language.

Language proficiency will be measured as read+write+type+speak in future.

-Santhosh