Hello! Greetings from America!

[ahangama]

Your design is the best Sinhala font design. I saw this font used by
one of your users elsewhere.

The font is UNAMBIGUOUS! Ambiguity has been plaguing Sinhala since the
typewriter days. Your hal mayanna and miyanna are distinguishable. I
see that you use somewhat the CJKV style to select letters from a
selection bar. Good thinking. It has other promises... Later.

I must say hat this is the REAL software made for modern systems by
Lankans themselves. I am proud of you and my people who really THINK
and INNOVATE than begging from the government and licking the backside
of the white man. I always believed that we have the talent that can
match anyone in the world.

All in all, this is a winner and stands at number one position.

If you are the same people that developed the original web based
Singlish program, congratulations! It is that program that gave me
inspiration to make the SBCS based Sinhala that I call Dual-script
Sinhala. It is simply a font on top of romanizing.

Here's an example of romanizing (an extension of Anglo-Saxon
alphabet):
obagee akxara kramaya aða síhalayata þiyena hoÐama kramyayi. ee gæna
magee prazásaa piøiganu mæna.

I tried but failed to make contact with the original Singlish
developers years back with a view to collaborate. Now that I have
found you, would you like to join with me to pool our skills to
develop systems for all Indic languages?

jayanþa ahágama

[විශ්ව කුමාර]

Oh, Sorry. I must admit this!
I have not designed a font. It is the Iskola Potha; the default
Sinhala Font for Microsoft.
But the software will work with any Unicode Sinhala fond as well as DL
family legacy fonts.

Thank you very much for your complements. It will help me to keep up
the spirit to go a long journey.

Yes, I would like to join with you to extend this for many other indic
scripts. The basic idea I had is to make it easier to typewrite from
the keyboard. In your example there are some letters like ð, í, þ, Ð,
æ, á and ø are hard to type with the keyboard, but goes with the
phonotic standerds.

It is hard to say who made the Singlish Sinhala first. I got two
awards for a previous version of this software back on 2002 and 2004.

Thank you very much and I wish you a happy new year!

[ahangama]

[Second try of the same message]
My dear friend whose real name I wish to know.

I am so glad that I got a positive reply from a Sinhalese programmer
involved with Sinhala for computers.
You said: Yes, I would like to join with you to extend this for many
other Indic scripts.
I write with much encouragement and hope.

First, for my background. I am an IT consultant in the US specializing
in networks and office modernization. I am also a 'student' of
linguist in my spare time continuing from my college specialization. I
am an accomplished programmer and have even developed specialized
network based programs. My time constraints require a partner who
could work with FireFox developers to work on an Extension.

You mentioned non-English letters. You don't have to bother about hem
at all if you use my smartfonts. You see the Sinhala letters directly.
Windows Vista computers don't need language localizing for Dual-script
Sinhala.

Well, if you insist on using romanized Sinhala, I ask you to think
about European languages. They have these SAME non-English characters.
When I chose them for Sinhala, I consulted an expert Icelandic
typographer because Icelandic was used by English departments of
American Universities for Old English (since the 1980s). First, as a
student of Anglo-Saxon or Old-English (OE), I found that Sinhala
phoneme set (zabða maalaava) is nearly identical to that of OE. So, I
followed Icelandic, which is the modern language closest to OE.

I have analyzed the Sinhala alphabet going back to 1700s and am
confident that anything ever written in Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit
could be written using Romanized Sinhala and rendered in my fonts.
This is why I know all the Indic languages could be based on SBCS. The
secret in successfully porting Indic to the computer is not through
analysis of letter shapes used for keyboard positions but the
positioning of phonemes on it. We all speak a phonetic language.
Letters are secondary to phonemes.

Here is how these extra letters are typed using the Windows US-
International keyboard:
AltGr means the right-hand-side Alt key
æ: (The sound of 'a' in hat) AltGr+z
þ: (Alt+t)
ð: (Alt+d)
á, í, ú, é, ó: (' followed by the modified letter)
µ: (AltGr+m)
ø: (AltGr+l)
ç: (AltGr+,)
ñ: (AltGr+n)
û: Iruyanna (^ followed by u)
ä, ï, ü, ë, ö: (" followed by the modified letter)
ô: Iluyanna (^ followed by o)
I ordered the letters in their relative frequency of usage.
Macintosh has Alternate English (?) and Linux: Dead-key keyboard that
follow the same pattern above.

Making a keyboard (IME) for Windows is much easier than the
programming you did for your application. So, I made a FAST-TYPING
Sinhala keyboard suitable for even court-room transcription (100 wpm).
The idea is to place the keys in intuitive positions. Dr. Edmonton at
University of Texas agreed with me and the famous Linguist/
Mathematician Wendy Krieger actually worked with me in selecting the
keys. Here is that scheme.
æ: z (the letter z stands for hal þaaluja sayanna or gayanu shayanna)
þ: t
ð: d
t: (Alt+t)
d: (Alt+d)
z: (AltGr+z)
á, í, ú, é, ó: (Alt + modified letter)
û: Iruyanna (Shift+r)
ñ: (AltGr+n)
µ: (AltGr+m)
ç: (AltGr+,)
ø: (AltGr+l)
ä, ï, ü, ë, ö: (Shift + modified letter)
ô: Iluyanna (Shift+l)

The emphasis was for touch-typing using the same QWERTY keyboard used
for English. I tested two American women typing Sinhala as dictated.
Only delay was to train them to recognize Sinhala phonemes without
confusing them with English ones. You can type Sinhala if you learn
regular English keyboard touch typing WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE KEYBOARD.

If we are to meaningfully enter the digital world, we need to be able
to do all things the Westerners do with computers in Sinhala too. As a
bonus, if we use the European style keyboard, the Sinhala user would
automatically get familiarized with English giving them a leg up to
self- study English.

But these funny letters are lingering in your mind. If you really
care, please call venerable Sumangala and see for yourself how
superior the Dual-script Sinhala is:
Udagama Sumangala
Sri Lanka-Nippon Buddhist Centre
Samanalawatta, Meegahatenna
Telephone: (94)-34-228-4604

Of course, you don't have to go through all that trouble if you go
here:
http://www.lovatasinhala.com/download
Just download 09-Future.zip file and see what it says. This is where I
need one more person involved so that my work is shared.

When Sinhala could be directly used on web pages using Latin-1, Dual-
script would reign high rescuing the back country non-English
population from digital isolation. If you join me, we could get there
sooner and go on to make some serious money with Indic.

Write to me directly because I forget to come here.

Jayantha Ahangama
j...@LANandWAN.com

[Vishva Kumara]

Yes I got your message. I downloaded the future.zip. It is really great work. I can't completely understand how the smart font works. Doesn't it need some rendering program like Uniscriber to display text...

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<~..:: [විශ්ව කුමාර] ::..~>