SDL, IIT Madras is pleased to offer a simple but useful online transliteration service for presenting Indian language text through Images. Over the years, absence of standardization in Text Encoding and Fonts for Indian languages has created a lot of confusion in disseminating text through web pages. The service provided here allows the text to be seen through images generated on the fly. The service allows the text to be input in ITRANS format as part of the URL for the service.

The service works in the following way.

The ITRANS equivalent of the string to be displayed is specified as part  of the URL for the service. The script in which the text string should be  displayed may also be specified. This allows for dynamic creation of the image which can then be displayed in the web browser. when the URL is received, the ITRANS text is internally converted into syllables which are then displayed using the IITM utilities running as services in the Acharya Server.

The URL to be submitted is

http://acharya.gen.in:8080/ol_serv/webimg.php?lang=LLL&content=cc...c

Here the LLL stands for the three letter code for the script and cc...c the actual text to be transliterated. Refer to the language codes on the right.

http:-------------/webimg.php?lang=SAN&content=vandE%20mAtaram

would result in an image displaying "vande mataram" in Devanagari. The %20 represents a space in the string. One may also use %0A to start a new line in the display.

The input text does not strictly conform to the ITRANS specification since IITM has come up with a uniform scheme for all the scripts. This scheme is shown below. Departure from the scheme will often result in Roman text getting mixed with local language text.

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The following are the language codes.

SAN - Sanskrit (Devanagari)
TAM - Tamil
TEL - Telugu
KAN - Kannada
MAL - Malayalam
Ori - Oriya
BEN - Bengali
GUJ - Gujarati
PUN - Gurmukhi
IPA - Roman Diacritics.
 
 

Use this service to include Indian language text in messages exchanged in NewsGroups or email. Prepare the message in HTML format and include the URL at the appropriate place.

You may also use the service to generate an image and use it statically if you so desire. Being an image the text will be displayed properly on almost all the Browsers. You will not run into any problem with fonts or or wrongly interpreted text due to varying encoding standards.

Acharya Logo
Swan and her cygnets. A happy scene.

Image source
www.genre.fsnet.co.uk/gallery/birds/cygnets.jpg
Reproduced with permission from the author John Robinson