From kalyan@icphp1.epfl.ch Mon Jun 27 15:32:29 1994
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Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 17:28:57 +0200
From: kalyan@icphp1.epfl.ch (kuppuswamy kalyanasundaram)
Message-Id: <9406271528.AA15086@icphp1.epfl.ch>
To: gs4t@honi1.acc.Virginia.EDU
Subject: convertors for tamil fonts/transliteration schemes
Status: RO

Dear Swaminathan:
I read with much interest the responses of various persons including
yourself posted in the newsgroup SCT as a follow up of my posting
on "standardisation of keys in tamil fonts".
I have no personal experience using any of the transliteration schemes
such as Madurai or Adami to comment on them. I have been a Macintosh
fan for a number of years now and have spent sometime in the last year
trying to use/understand some of the tamil  fonts of WYSIWYG for Mac
and Windows. As you know these tamil fonts allow anyone with a PC
(under Windows) or Mac to type in tamil text using directly tamil characters.
One can work in a true multilingual mode-the number of languages one
can mix depends on the font types installed. I am aware that one can 
almost the same stuff using meta fonts using TeX.
Due to the current problems of using 8-bit codes, in the identical tamil 
fonts that work on Mac and Windows platforms, any tamil character
can be typed using one or two keystrokes of basic 128 ASCII keyboard.

In a sample test over the network, I sent tamil texts prepared using the
tamil font Mylai as a "plain text file" by electronic mail to receipients across
the atlantic. For those who have the same tamil fonts on their PC/Mac,
it was a kid's job of converting the email received as a non-readable file
to a tamil file simply by changing the fonts to the required tamil one. So
exchanging of tamil files prepared using these tamil fonts over the electronic
network is not a problem, as I see it. If you are interested, I can send you
(in binary form or UUencoded format) these tamil fonts and a sample file
as a plain text. You can load the fonts on your Windows or Mac PC and
see what I am talking about. So even archiving tamil files prepared using
these tamil fonts in a compressed format in an electronic archive is OK.

I have been interested in the convertors. My main concern now is 
converting files made this way to one of transliterated ones following 
Madurai (or equivalent Adami or XX formats). 
In your recent postings, you have pointed out that one needs basically
four converters to go between the transliterated and font based versions:
     Key board mapping
            |
            | 
            |
            V
  Tamil Text in Tamil Fonts
          /   \       ^
         /     \       \
        /       \       \
       V         V       \
  PostScript     Transliterated Text
If I give you the keyboard mapping for a WYSIWYG tamil font and 
a sample tamil text, how difficult is to develop a converter that will
transform such derived "plain text files" to one of true "transliterated
ones" (and vice versa). I can send a comparative keymapping table
if you are interested on this problem/development of convertors. I am
a chemist who uses computers to get scientific experiments going but
real chicken when comes to writing programmes or convertors.

As mentioned above, if you wants to have a feel for the tamil texts 
prepared using tamil fonts on macintosh or Windows, I can send you the
tamil fonts. Please let me know whether you want to try them on Windows
or Mac and whether you prefer to receive the font file as simple hexa-
bianry format or uuencoded.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon,
Kalyan

Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram,
Inst. of Physical Chemistry,
Swiss Federal Insat
Inst. of Technology,
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Tel: 41-21-693 3622   Fax: 41-21-693 411
Email:  kalyan@icphp1.epfl.ch


