Conversion Utilities: Basic information
This page
is devoted to providing brief descriptions of the utilities and applications
distributed as part of the IITM Multilingual Software.
A short Readme
is provided below for each of the programs distributed by the Systems Development
Laboratory. These should help the reader get an idea of the application, installation
guidelines and download instructions. For some utilties, an independent page
may be present discussing the features of the uility.
Tview and Tconvert
These are
programs to allow ITRANS and other Transliteration schemes based files to
be converted into the IITM format (.llf). The applications are available
for Windows (32 bit application) as well as for Linux. The Windows version
is included in the distribution of the Multilingual Editor. The Windows version
is GUI based while the one for Linux works from the command line.
Tview and
Tconvert convert the ASCII file prepared according to the Transliteration
scheme into a .llf file which may be viewed using LB the multilingual viewer
or even the multilingual editor. LB may be used as an external viewer for
ITRANS, RIT and MYLAI based text along with your web browser.
"tview" will
handle a number of transliteration schemes while "tconvert" is basically
meant for ITRANS. There are minor differences between the scheme supported
here from standard ITRANS. This has been done primarily to standardize the
scheme for all the scripts.
There is an independent
page discussing tview and tconvert
.
Download
tconvert for Linux
LLF2HTML
This is a
simple application to convert the contents of a .llf file (prepared using
the multilingual editor) into the .html format for display on web pages.
The display of the text in html requires the use of the designated fonts.
The fonts used for this purpose may also be downloaded from this site. The
Windows 9X/2000/XP version of the application is included in the multilingual
editor distribution. The Linux version of the application is available for
download using the link below. There is a separate page discussing some important
issues in generating html documents displaying text with Indian language
fonts.
Download
llf2html utility
Source Code
LLF2GIF
This is an
application for presenting Indian language text as a .GIF image for use with
Web Browsers. The application converts text prepared using the IITM Multilingual
editor (or other through other means) into an appropriate graphic image which
is typically 480 pixels wide. Text with up to 200 lines of Indian language
text may be instantly converted into the graphic format. This application
runs under Linux. The distribution is effected as a simple .tgz file. This
is a standalone application which will not require any dynamically loaded
libraries. This application can be used along with a web browser to dynamically
generate the image from a .llf file in the server. The on line Sanskrit Lessons served from this
site use this application to generate the lessons on the fly. Installation
instructions are included in the distribution.
After downloading
the tar.gz package, extract the files in the archive to a suitable directory.
The utility relies on support files and fonts for the different scripts. These
files are included in the distribution. The current distribution requires
the gd library as well as freetype support to be available on your system.
The gd library version should support gif image generation.
Download
llf2gif utility
Source Code
LLF2PNG, LLF2JPG, LLF2PS
The utilities
llf2png and llf2jpg are similar to llf2gif. The gd library has specific functions
to create different image formats from a natively defined format and so the
source code for these will be more or less identical with that of llf2gif.
The PostScript
conversion utiltiy converts local language files into the PostScript format
which may be seen using any PostScript viewer or printed on PostScript printers.
The PostScript fonts designed at IITM are used in displaying the text. The
fonts (pfb) are not embedded into the document but can be located in the
directory where the PostScript interpreter (GhostScript) looks for fonts.
Download sources
llf2png
llf2jpg
llf2ps
Conversion to Unicode
The Unicode
conversion utility may be used to convert local language files into Unicode
and back. The utility converts an llf document into the UTF-8 format and
UCH-2 if required.
Download the source
for Linux llf2uni
LLF2PDF and e-book creation
The
llf2pdf
utility will be useful for creating Adobe PDF files which can be viewed with
most systems and are therefore highly recommended for use on the web. The
advantage of the utility is that it creates documents with embedded fonts
which makes it even more useful on the web.
This
utility has been written using the c-pdf library which is freely distributed.
The llf2pdf program can generate simple but highly usable e-books in Indian languages.
Sorting Utility
The sorting
utility allows sorting of text prepared according to the .llf format. This
application will correctly sort each line of text in the correct lexical
order.
The utility
has been written as a PERL application and can be run either on the Windows
or Linux platforms. It is assumed that PERL (Version5.x) has been installed
on your system. The distribution comes with a brief description of
the utility along with a sample file which may be sorted. There is a separate
page discussing the utility and some specific sorting
issues in respect of Indian languages.
Download sorting Utility (PERL source)
