Online resources have been made possible at this site as a result of the Multilingual applications that can be deployed from a web server. Systems Development Lab., IIT Madras is pleased to offer several resources for the benefit of the viewers. These are classified into groups based on the nature of the information served or service provided.

• Learning Resources
• References
• Online Databases
• Online services
• online demos
• Tutorials, quizzes
• Linguistic resources

Learning Resources

  Learn Sanskrit, our popular presentation on Learning Sanskrit through self study. The online lessons have won appreciation from the world community not only for their simplicity and effectiveness but the unique manner in which the lessons are presented in Devanagari script. The lessons have remained popular from 1997 when the first few lessons were put up. The lessons have been revised in 2006.

  Akshara Animation refers to learning the stroking order for the aksharas in different scripts. This is a unique presentation through Java Applets. Please use the links on the right to reach the appropriate pages.

  Braille Related information has been included from 2001 to allow sighted persons become familiar with the principles of English Braille as well as Bharati Braille, the standard followed in India. The pages disseminating information relating to Braille also serve as useful tutorials.

  The quizzes relating to Learning Sanskrit and Braille are one of a kind on the web.

References

  Online references relate to text from the scriptures and ancient literary works in Sanskrit and Tamil, two very old languages of India. The presentations include word by word meanings and translations in English. Search facilities are provided for searching through the texts. Included here are the Bhagavadgita, Upanishads, Tolkappiam and Tiukkural.

  The pages relating to the scripts of India present detailed information on the scripts and the writing systems employed for each script.

  The online Sanskrit Dictionary is another unique presentation with search features and results returned in  Devanagari script.

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Transliteration Maps

  General online reference in different transliteration schemes in use.

Online Databases

  Searchable online databases containing useful reference data. Indian Postal code data is presented as also Audio Book information for the Visually handicapped.

Online Services

  Online services include useful resources for people where multilingual documents are generated and distributed through web interfaces. these include transliteration based services, generation of test documents in Unicode, Braille Transcription for the benefit of the Visually Handicapped. The Multilingual Software allows effortless creation of E-Books in different Indian languages that can have multilingual content as also English.

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Online Demos

  The demos constitute applications that illustrate the strength of the IITM approach to multilingual computing on the web. These demos show the capabilities of the applications which are based on the syllable level coding employed for representing text in a uniform manner across the scripts. The demos clearly establish the viability of multilingual computing and localization of applications. The text to speech features are also illustrated in the demo pages. 

   Notable among the demos are the Akshara Animation page and the Search Engine application. Examples are shown for searches in the text of Bhagavadgita or Tirukkural

   The demo on online text to speech synthesis shows how speech can be synthesized using MBROLA. Speech synthesis is illustrated for Sanskrit as well as Tamil.

Unicode Test Pages

 The main strength of the Multilingual Software developed at the lab is the approach to working with Indian languages at the level of syllables. This approach results in very efficient representation of text in terms of fixed length codes for syllables which can also be quickly converted to other representations such as Unicode or ISCII. The service provided here allows one to submit text in any of the scripts and get a  web page containing Unicode representation of the text. 

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Online transliteration service

  This service allows one to include Indian language text in any web page by displaying the text in the form of an image. This way, one can display text without the need to install additional software or fonts in the systems. The service allows text to be submitted in transliterated form and the result returned as an image.  This service will be useful for those who wish to include Indian language text strings in a web page that is predominantly in English.  The line below is an example of how this service works.

  The above string (image) is returned when the submitted URL is 

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/ol_serv/webimg.php?lang=SAN&content=bhAratam

Tutorials

   Useful tutorials have been included at this site. As mentioned earlier in the page, the tutorials have been prepared to provide the details required to understand the writing systems used in India as well as the concepts in Braille. The computer science related tutorials relate to the operation of the 8086 CPU as well as the concepts in Virtual memory. Basic information relating to the tutorials is available in the linked page.

Linguistic references

  The pages relating to Linguistics provide information on linguistic corpora that have been generated for analysis. Useful information is also included on word structures that exhibit amazing geometrical patterns of akshara symmetry including very long palindromes!

  The pages on "Computing With Tamil" contain useful information on aspects of Tamil Computing that will be interest to application developers.

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