Talk Details

A Javascript Indic Input Method Editor

Name Surekha Sastry

Organisation Sarai Consultant

Website http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic

Scope Technical

Topic Localisation and Indic Computing

Type talk

Abstract Browser is the essential tool for most of web publishing like blogs, email, discussion forums, online knowledge centers etc.If the input for any of these needs to be in a local language, one would require a tool which would facilitate the input mechanism. We have developed one such tool called "Indic Input Method Editor (IME) Toolbar". An IME is a tool which allows an user to input in local language(s) by selecting a keyboard layout. A Web-application can add this feature with their forms so that one choose to input indic content. We(Surekha & Raghavan) came up with the idea of developing the IME Toolbar, so that the tool is installed once and is available everytime the browser
application opens up. The languages that are currently supported by this tool are 10 Indian Language scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurumukhi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu). Two keyboard layouts are provided viz, WX (phonetic) and INSCRIPT
to enable Indic input. The tool is developed as an extension for Mozilla based browsers as these browsers follow open standards which is an incentive for developers to contribute back to the community.

The "Indic IME Toolbar" is an open source tool developed using XUL (XML User Interface Language) and Javascript technologies. It works in most of the modern Mozilla based browsers since they are Javascript enabled. This tool can be easily extended to include other keyboard layouts like bolnagari, ITRANS etc. This
tool has been extended by Ramakrishna and group to facilitate Online Translation mechanism on web browsers
(http://entrans.sourceforge.net ).

The tool is made available for download at
1. Mozdev.org (http://indicime.mozdev.org) with links to install the toolbar onto your browser, screenshots, source code and documentation.

2. Indicart (http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic), a centralized repository of Indic resources.

3. Firefox Extensions website (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1177)

Limitations:

The logic of keyboard to unicode character mapping is currently handled within Javascript.It can be improved so that the keyboard to unicode character mapping can come from an external mapping file.

Experiences:

This tool was developed with Raghavan. It has been a good learning experience to realize that Javascript can be used to develop an Indic IME. XUL is the new technology that we had to learn to develop the toolbar. This highlights the advantages of Open Source Software and Open Standards. One can easily learn, develop and integrate new features to widely used software like the Firefox browser.

I have taught my mom to use this tool to write mails. She no longer feels uncomfortable using the technology, except that she had to be trained a little on using the keyboard layout.

Ramesha (office boy), is very good at writing stories. He uses this tool to write stories in Kannada. So, all his work is now blogged and he feels proud about it.

The earlier versions of the same tool has been integrated with online communities like Indicart on Indian Language work (http://mail.sarai.net:8080/indic) and sexual minorities (http://dharanitrust.org/pantoto)

Pre-requisites Knowledge about encodings, fonts

Profile Surekha Sastry, Post Graduate in Computer Applications, is a Sarai Indic Fellow (http://sarai.net). She works in collaboration with Srinivasa Raghavan (Indic Sarai Fellow) to build Indic front-end and back-end tools. Prior to this, she has worked with the Anusaaraka Group (Language Technologies Research Centre, IIIT, Hyderabad) in developing a user interface for the English-Hindi machine translation system. She has participated in the Asia Source event that was held in January'05.