Technology For Society

Focus on technology trends that create an impact on larger part of Society.

INDIKEYS: Keymap stickers for Indian Languages

Using computer through my mother tongue is my hobby. I started doing it some time in 2005, when Linux started sporting this feature. The indic localization improved a lot. I also contributed to Telugu localization of Firefox. Recently, I became interested in Indian language Wikipedias. I realized that though there are lot of members, active contributors are very few.
The big problems I think are awareness and the hurdle to start typing in native language on the English keyboard.

While people from Asia pacific countries such as Japan and China can be proud of their native language support on Computers, we in India have to bear with this problem for few more decades. The colonial rule that we endured is a blessing because we acquired English language which benefitted us in IT. It is also a bane because it made our native languages second class citizens on computers.

While indian government has been working at this for quite some time, the use of native languges is dismally low. Even CDAC's release of Linux based distribution in Indian languages is hindered as it does not provide basic keyboard stickers for Indian languages using Inscript, a complicated key mapping scheme for newbies. There are costly foreign solutions. After trying for few months to find Indian language stickers, I came up with a simple sticker generation scheme, using printing on self-adhesive laser printer paper. A sample file for Telugu and the pdf are available. It can be easily adopted for other Indian languages.

2 comments:

Arjun September 28, 2009 at 6:14:00 PM PDT  

Ravi's response on indlinux-group email is reproduced here for ease of access.
****
Thanks. I had duplicated this with Girgit - so that one can create
printable file in their own language with one click - Simply click the
respective language on top of the page :



Regards,
Ravi

Suresh Kumar Shukla December 7, 2009 at 12:03:00 AM PST  

Get a real Devanagari bilingual Inscript (Rs 300/-) and save yourself time to maintain this jugaad :)

http://anektameekta.blogspot.com/2009/03/devnagri-hindi-typing-complete-solution.html

namaste,
Suresh

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