Santhosh Thottingal സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍

Microsoft will be signing up Malayalam movie star Mammootty as one of the brand ambassadors for the Computer Literacy programme that is to be organized soon in Kerala. FOSS community writes an open letter to Mammootty to Reconsider Promotion of Microsoft and their Proprietary Softwares.

It is available here: An open letter to Mammootty. I request all to endorse Open letter to Mammooty by adding your name there.

A nice post on ILUG-TVM on the issue: Another of M$'s dirty tactics

A good page layout package for GNU/Linux with Indic language and unicode support is one of the missing item in the list of software packages for Indic computing. Scribus gives hope but it is still not ready to serve the purpose. So what could be the solution? Should we wait or find out 'workarounds'?
No, There is a solution. Till scribus is ready with indic support Inkscape will help us. Inkscape is not a DTP software, but it can do it if required. Using its text objects and other text/image editing features we can design pages in Unicode itself. And with Pango rendering.
Using inkscape is not difficult and it comes with good tutorials in SVG format and those tutorial pages are also an illustration of how to do page layout. You can save your work in SVG, PNG ,PDF etc..


I just tried to design two pages in Malayalam and result was satisfactory.



Thanks to Anivar for pointing out this possibility of Inkscape.

Dhvani can help not only blind users but also dumb users. I will explain how dhvani act as your mouth using KMouth.
Kmouth is as KDE Accessibility Appllication and it act as a test to speech front end. KMouth is a program that enables persons that cannot speak to let their computers speak. It includes a history of spoken sentences from which the user can select sentences to be re-spoken. It learns the words the user wrote and have autocompletion. It also includes a phrasebook, using that you can store the commonly used phrases for quick access.
We will see how dhvani can be used with Kmouth.
open KMouth : KMenu->Utilities->Accessibility->Kmouth. Install it if not already installed
You will get configuration window and give the "Command to speak text" as dhvani %f




Done. Now you can type some text in the Kmouth and ask it speak.



To avoid typing the words that are used often, create a Phrasebook. Refer KMouth Help document for that. You can also add a wordlist so that you will get autocompletion feature while typing words. Refer Kmouth Handbook for that also. It is easy and just a matter of giving some text file to learn.
I hope it will be helpfull for the dumb users even though there are some practical problem like keeping the computer with them...

For for information about dhvani, how to install etc see the documentation

It is possible integrate Dhvani Indian Langauge TTS to KDE desktop through its TTS system KTTS. Using this you can dhvani can read the text in kate,kedit,kwrite, Konqueror. You can even listen to the text in the webpages in Konqueror
Dhvani can be itegrated to KTTS using its Command plugin feature. To do this go to control center-->Regional and Accessibility -->Text-to-speech -->Talker Tab. Add a new Synthesizer.


Select the syntesizer type as Command and Langauge as Other. You can select any language since Dhvani doesn't want langauge parameter and it detects the language automatically.
Give the synthesizer command as dhvani %f



Move this synthesizer to top in the list of Synthesizers and Click apply. Done.
Now take a UTF-8 text in any of the editors described above or take a webpage in any of the supported language. From the tools menu take Speak Text and listen !!!
For for information about dhvani, how to install etc see the documentation

Gnome released its 2.22 version . The GNOME desktop and platform received many improvements and new features.
It has official support for 46 languages. Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati and Punjabi completed more than 80% of translations and present in the supported languages.


Read the release notes to know the new features

Dhvani can be used for creating audiobooks in any of the supported languages(Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Panjabi).
First of all you should get the latest dhvani source code from CVS in sourceforge. Compile it and install.
To create an audiobook follow these steps
You need the text in utf-8 format. No need to specify the langauge. Dhvani will detect the langauge automatically.

dhvani -o audiobook.wav textfile
oggenc -B 16 -C 1 -R 16000 audiobook.wav

Now you have a file called audiobook.ogg. If you prefer ogg, then your audiobook is ready. If you want the file in mp3 format

oggdec audiobook.ogg
(This will create a file named audiobook.ogg.wav )
lame --preset 192 -ms -h audiobook.ogg.wav
(install lame if it is not present using your package manager)

Now your mp3 file is ready. Transfer it to your music player and enjoy!

I have a sample Malayalam Audio book here

Note: The speech produced for Languages other than Hindi and Malayalam may not be as per their pronunciation rules. There are two solution for this:
a) Teach me that langauge ;) or
b) Submit a patch to fix that language module

You can find the Dhvani documentation here

Dhvani is a winner of FOSS India Awards 2008.
There are 20 winners and more details here.
Indic support for Tuxtype project by Mobin and friends is also a winner. Congrats Mobin and Congrats to all winners!!!
And Thanks to LFY and NRCFOSS

When will these journalists understand the difference between the _Hacker_ and Cracker?
See these two news
1. ADMK website hacked again
2. Hacker who stole bank details held
3. Goa govt web site hacked by Turkish hacker


Dear journalists, Could you please find time to read these?
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/IfYouAre#journalist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Hackers
Hackers are not Crackers

Microsoft legal department team members inspected the computer shops in Trivandrum and Kollam districts , Kerala for 'pirated Microsoft softwares ' with the help of police on Dec 20. More details: here and here

Learning how to type in our own Mother tongue is always a problem for newbies. Usually we will just use English as "yeh kya hey" while chatting/mailing. It is because of this reason the transliteration based input methods are more popular than the Inscript in some languages. Google recently released their Indic transliterate service, a web based text editor which will take English words and convert to Indic languages with the help of some machine learning.
But as far as a normal user is concerned there are many things missing there. It works only if you are online, the suggestions it is listing for English words are often wrong words with spelling mistakes, not a free software etc..
It is in this context, I tried to develop a Desktop application which will act as transliteration based text editor with almost all features of Google transliterate and with some extra features. The project is called as 'Sulekha", meaning "one who writes well"
What is Sulekha
Sulekha is a GTK based text editor. It transliterated the English words to Malayalam (It is not only designed for Malayalam. but I started it for Malayalam) when user types space/newline. If the transliterated word is an actual Malayalam word , Sulekha will replace the English word with the Malayalam word. Other wise we will try to get an exact match from the dictionary we have. If there are multiple words which matches the transliterated word, we will show it as an option list, just like a spell checker. If there is no suggestions, there is a onscreen keyboard, using that user can type using mouse and we will add that new word to the dictionary. Thereby Sulekha learns new words.

If one experienced user wants to use type some words using any input methods, we can disable the sulekha algorithm as well. Then it works as a normal text editor. Sulekha uses Aspell for word learning and suggestions. There is a transliteration engine which transliterated the word to a particular language.
So it is possible to extend Sulekha to any language having Aspell word list. Just need to write one transliteration engine which it language specific. Sulekha editor is a hack on the gtkspell library code which works as a basis for GEDIT text editor. If possible, we can think about a web based sync of word lists also.

The project is not complete, but the code is available in the GIT repository of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing at Savannah
To build the code;
./configure
make

To run:
For editor :
sulekha
For commandline transliterator
sulekha englishword_to_transliterate


This is the TODO list of Sulekha as of now
1. Onscreen keyboard- Coding and Integration
2. Session dictionary/System dictionary Handling
3. Fixing some bugs in Transliteration system, especially the letters after Chillu.- need a small correction in the algorithm
4. Implementing the Editor Menu functions, File Handling
5. Tuning Aspell configuration for the Edit distance optimization for the best suggestions, Currently the suggestion list is too big and suggestion words include words with more than 2 edit distance.
6. Handling the edit inside the word
7. Web Integration

If you are interested in this project/adding new language support please contact santhosh00 at gmail.com

Happy Hacking!!!