What next in Malayalam computing?

Now that a significant amount of progress has been made on encoding standards issues, time is now ripe for anybody interested in Malayalam language deployment to think about what else is required to enable impeccable support for Malayalam.

Here is my take, in no particular order of preference:-

• Assigning accelerator keys to various menu items - like "ctl=s" for save.
• Compiling a list of pre-fixes and suffixes for wordlists.
• Arriving at some sort of consensus on basic characters to constitute conjuncts.
• More keyboard layouts.

Thankfully, some of the more fundamental work - like locale definitions and collation orders -- have been done for us by the Swatantra Malayalam Computing, a project by FSF India.

And unfortunately, the FSF-I project was a sponsored project, (with funds coming from Government of India) and once the funds ran out, the project got orphaned. It took the enthusiasm and hard work of one group of people to get things going.

Personally, I do not want my contributions to increase the currently available mass of non-standard Malayalam data. I guess my stand is vindicated by the infrequent posts in the Unicode's Indic mailing list, stating things like "plenty of Malayalam is already out there on the web, what is wrong with that, and fixing problems with the standards will render that data bad etc.?"

While expressing my thanks to that group (Praveen, Anivar Aravind, etc) for their contributions, for the rest of you out there - please see the list above - feel free to add to it.

# posted by Mahesh T. Pai / മഹേഷ് ടി. പൈ @ 10:10 am