Summary of pages presented
at this web site.
Information presented at
the acharya web site is broadly divided into the categories indicated below.
Multilingual Computing
Concepts and issues
The topics discussed
here include text representation, syllabic writing systems, existing standards
for text representation, implementation issues across platforms.
Technical discussions
on Encoding Standards (Unicode, ISCII and Font standards), language enabling,
localization, Data Entry methods have been presented in a detailed manner.
Roman transliteration
has been effectively used to represent texts in different Indian languages.
This representation is very useful for understaning data entry. However,
the variations seen in the transliteration schemes which have been in use
will have to be understood in the context of the aksharas they represent.
Variations across languages is inevitable and the pages devoted to these
discussions provide insights into the methods which could be used for generating
text in Indian languages.
All the discussions
are covered under "Software Design Issues".
Linguistics and Computation
Linguistic aspects
include discussions on the writing systems and the different scripts in
use. The need to deal with syllabic writing systems is emphasized in these
pages.
Linguistic processing
Software discussed as part of this includes programs for frequency analysis
of aksharas, concordance generation and creation of linguistic corpora.
IITM Software
IITM Software refers
to a set of applications and tools for developing computer applications
in Indian languages. The Acharya site provides detailed information on
the concept of the syllable level coding scheme adopted for text representation.
Examples of applications for use in many areas of computing e.g., manuscript
preservation, web publishing, search engines, Fonts, speech synthesis etc.,
have been included.
Discussions on these
topics are covered under "IITM Software" in the section relating to "About
Acharya".
Downloads
The pages relating
to Downloads provide details on the applications and utilities which may
be downloaded and used. For each application, details of download procedures,
installation and help in usage are provided. Where required, the platform
related information is given along with instructions for compilation of
the sources.
Information on Downloads
is available under the "Downloads" link.
Applications for the disabled
The speech enhanced
applications developed as part of the IITM project have been put to good
use to train disabled persons in the use of computers. Besides the popular
speech enhanced multilingual editor, the software inlcudes a speech enhanced
web browser (Lynx) and a screen reader (Jaws for Dos adapted to work under
Microsoft Windows and Linux). Braille transcription from text to Bharati
Braille is another useful utility that can be used to prepare Braille Documents.
The web site also serves on-line e-texts for the benefit of the Visually
Handicapped students in schools and colleges.
"Enabling the Disabled"
is the section covering these pages.
Online references and
resources
One of the important
presentations at this web site relates to reference material as well as
on-line resources which may be used by viewers to accomplish specific tasks.
For example, users may create a PDF document which they could deploy at
other web sites to disseminate multilingual information. The on-line services
at this site include several applications catering to text preparation,
linguistic processing, Unicode test page generation, to name a few. The
pages are broadly divided into four areas.
Learning resources
(Sanskrit and Braille)
References
Computer Science Tutorials
On-line services for the
Visually handicapped
Online resources also
include several demo applications highlighting the aspects of the approach
to Software design using syllable level codes.
All these are discussed
under "On-line Resources".
