Re: [Gnoppix-devel] Software to include

[Ramanan Selvaratnam]

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 22:43, Markus Maiwald wrote:

> Am Dienstag, 2. Dezember 2003 01:30 schrieb Ramanan Selvaratnam:
> > Anyone looked at Dasher 3.2.0 ... direct input into any UTF-8 app.
> > It will be in 2.6
> >
> > Unfortunately it is still not in SID due to the ongoing problems, the
> > last time I looked. But the deb package is ready at
> > http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/Download.html
> 
> I am very impressed!!
> Think we will give it a try, as it it useful for handicaped people.

I saw on gnome-desktop-devel that Dasher is talking to GOK team. Worth
checking up.

But in the case of Tamil the complication of conjunct text input methods
and satisfactory support in Pango being very recent, Dasher with its
initial tests is not too far behind the existing traditional GTK-IMs.

The predictive text input training needs to be tested for many different
langs so I CC to gnoppix-india (not sure whether this is working
though). 
Teaching Dasher the rules  of different langs needs experts of those
langs than hackers (or GNU/Linux installs even) so  getting Dasher
across to the linguists at this stage is very important IMHO. 

[...]

> > Dasher is a capable team too but I feel Gnoppix and Dasher will go well.


> maybe. You can make the contact.

mjg59 is CCed. He is a Debian developer too :-)

> 
> > Apart from being very impressive it is very easy to implement for
> > different langs. I am currently trying train Tamil to it and it does
> > learn fast.
> 
> btw: What language is it? An indish, I guess! ?

Indic is a better term.
But Tamil(ta) along with Malayalam, Kannadam and Telungu  are major
languages of the Dravidian family, now found in south India.
For technical purposes it probably must be remebered that the scripts
are very different to Devanagiri and other scripts found in North India.
Pango handles them all under an indic module though. I am Gnome-ta
maintainer.       

Best regards,

Ramanan