Typing Thamil2 in English keyboard is always difficult. Here is the easiest
way to do this. The principles are simple:
CONVENTIONS:
Write Thamil2 as consonant with vowel next to it
(as in English) which will make the total letters to be just 34 (12 vowels, 18
consonants and SA, SHA, JA and HA). Then we end up with less letters than in
English (it has 52 letters!). Then it is fairly easy to type just in english
and understand it perfectly in thamil2.
There are some problems though. As we have
two RA, three NA, LA; also OH and EH sounds do not have any way of defining in
English. These are defined by adding a number R1A, N1A, N2A, L1A, L2A, O1, E1 with
the stronger pronouncing ones having higher number. It can be modified according
to personal ideas (that is why the source file is provided and a section is
marked as Character Defining Section in the source file).
Capital and small letters have same characteristics.
Some equivalents: B = P, D = T, TH = DH, AU = OU, ZH = L2
All the end N are changed to N1 (if a . or space follows).
HOW TO DO:
With these conventions, we can type the text in English (ASCII) and run the
conversion program TRANSLAT, edit the output file in WORD, select the whole text and change
the font to MYLAIPLAIN and we will have text in nice Thamil2 letters. It is
fairly easy to recognize these character definitions than to remember any font's
keymap.
About the Program TRANSLAT:
The program first reads one line at a time and splits English letters and
equates to a single letter for each Tamil letter.
Vowels are defined as: a, b, c, d........
Consonants are defined as: A, B, C, D,.....
Then the ASCII character for MYLAI font are obtained from the consideration
of the consonant and the next vowel (or the absence of it).
Major problem was that we start with some number of letters and end up with
different number of letters (more letters or less letters). At the extreme, four
English letters may define just one Thamil2 letter or two English letters may
define three Tamil characters.
It may look funny to use Fortran for this purpose, but that is what I know and
surprisingly it worked fine.
