English to Kannada Converter for Linux
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Requirements

  • The program is written in perl which is available on almost all recent Linux distributions. The platform of development is Debian GNU/Linux (etch).

  • For the fonts to be visible properly on your system, you should have the Nudi and/or Baraha fonts available on your system. The Nudi fonts are also available from the download section.

Installation

  • This task is quite trivial. Just copy the file linek to a directory which is searched by your shell, say /usr/local/bin. Make sure that the permissions on the file are set properly. If not, set the same as

    chmod a+rx linek

  • Put the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/nudi and run fc-cache as superuser. Note that this layout is on my Debian system (as well as on Ubuntu); other distros might have a different layout for fonts.

Usage

The program, by default, reads the standard input and writes to the standard output. 

$ linek 
<kn>sirignfnwM gelfge</kn>
Ctrl-d
Ctrl-d means you hold the Ctrl key and simultaneously press the key marked d. You should see some garbled characters on screen. If the locale setting is set to en_US, you can safely copy and paste that into your editor of choice (Verify it by typing echo $LANG in your terminal.)

The better way is to prepare the document using a text editor of your choice and use that as the input to the program. The output can then be redirected to another file. 


$ linek < infile > outfile

Switches 


$ linek -h
will display a short help screen. 

$ linek -v
will display the version info.

Keyboard

For those who have little or no idea of the Nudi/KGP/KP Rao keyboard layout, the image below shows the layout of Kannada characters on the regular QWERTY keyboard.

Examples

Listed below are the character sequence one types to get the words in Kannada :

Manual

A detailed manual can be downloaded here.

Bugs

  • A wrong sequence of characters causes the program to get into a never ending loop. If your input is taking too long to be processed, kill the program and check your input.
  • If the tags are not closed properly, then also the program gets locked up.
  • There could be several more. If you find one, please send them to mas@mylug.org. I will try to fix it.
Page design : mas@mylug.org