Many of you might have heard of the
ITRANS
package, developed by Avinash Chopde, which can transliterate
text written in English into any of the various supported Indian languages.
So if you want to print how are you in Hindi, you just enter aap kaise hai.n ,
and you get , which is the desired output in devanagari script. Note that ITRANS is a transliteration system, not a translation
system.
While I've personally found this package very useful, I know that many people are intimidated by the prospect of installing a complex package, and figuring out how to use it. I therefore decided to develop a simple Web interface to the ITRANS package, so that users could access this wonderful program in a simple manner. Note that this web interface is very rudimentary in the sense that it supports only a small subset of the full ITRANS functionality. You can access the full functionality through an email server developed by Atul Narkhede. Here is some information on the email server.
I've currently installed Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, Bengali, Marathi (which is virtually the same as the Hindi font) and a beta version of the Gujarati postscript font on our system here at Washington University. The Hindi font has been developed by Frans Velthuis. . The Tamil font was created at the Humanities and Arts Computing Center of the University of Washington, USA, and is bundled with ITRANS. The Bengali font was originally developed by Anisur Rahman. The Gujarati font has been developed by Shrikrishna Patil, and incorporated into ITRANS by Prakash Trivedi and Avinash Chopde. The Kannada font is part of the newly available KanTeX distribution developed by G.S Jagadeesh and Ventakesh Gopinath. KanTex is derived from TeluguTex which is the source of the Telugu fonts used with this web interface. Note that the Kannada interface provided by this web interface runs directly on KanTeX, rather than ITRANS. In particular, note the use of the \Q and the \QQQ macros. The \QQQ macros is turned on by default.It would be good if someone volunteers to write an IFM file to integrate KanTeX with ITRANS.
To use the forms based interface provided at the bottom of this page, you need to arm yourself with a transliteration mapping table for the language you are interested in.
Now you are ready to use ITRANS ! In the form below, select the language you want your output to appear, and the font size. Then type away in the text entry area marked 'xliteration'. Once you are done entering your text, press the 'Submit' button. To reset the screen press the 'Reset' button.
You get the output in two formats: Postscript files (which can be printed out on most 300 dpi laser printers), and transparent GIF files, which you can stick in your home pages. So what are you waiting for? Mail a letter to a loved one, or a not so loved one, in the language of your choice. Happy transliterating!
Here are the three font sizes supported in each language:
\obeylines namaskaar . namaste
your output will appear as .
Now, if you want to get bigger a separation ,say 2 inches, between paragraphs, you can try
\obeylines namaskaar . \vskip2in namaste
which will generate the following GIF
Another way to ensure that separate lines typed at the input appear as separate lines in the output is to terminate each line with a double backslash like this- \\. For example, the following lines, if typed in the text entry area, will appear as two separate lines in the output.
bhaiyyaa \\ aap kaise hai.n \\The resultant output looks like this :
However, do not use a \\ by itself on a blank line, since that will cause the job to abort.
Last Modified: Feb 25 2001