Tamil into Transliterated script in Apple iPhone?

[N. Ganesan]

 

Is there an iPhone app by which we can convert incoming Tamil (or any Indic) text

into Latin (preferably ISo 15919) text?

 

For example, there is facility for Tamil in Google Android:

http://www.medianama.com/2011/01/223-sett-browser-for-android-addresses-tamil-sinhala-rendition-issues/

"SETT Browser (Sinhala English Tamil Trilingual), which is a modification of the open source Zirco browser for Android renders text that is both native (unicode) text as well as transliterated (into Latin script): users on Android 2.2-Froyo can use SETT Browser to read native text, but for older versions of Android (above 2.0, though), the browser displays text in transliterated in the Latin script. We tried the browser, and found that it rendered the text in both modes."

 

will be useful for many who do not know or know little Indic scripts,

but they may know how to speak it.

 

Thanks for any info,

N. Ganesan

 

[கா. சேது | K. Sethu]

On Thursday, January 20, 2011 7:34:43 AM UTC+5:30, N. Ganesan wrote:

 

[..]

For example, there is facility for Tamil in Google Android:

http://www.medianama.com/2011/01/223-sett-browser-for-android-addresses-tamil-sinhala-rendition-issues/

"SETT Browser (Sinhala English Tamil Trilingual), which is a modification of the open source Zirco browser for Android renders text that is both native (unicode) text as well as ..
[..]

"SETT" browser's rendering of Unicode content is not a "native" support. Actually SETT browser (created by Dhaniska as part of his final year project at University of Moratuwa) converts Unicode content to fit to use a custom made font that gets installed when that browser is installed - that font uses the legacy 8-bit Bamini's glyphs for charcters / ligatures all fitted to Unicode Tamil range (with some fifty odd existing vacancies in the range 0B80-0BFF also used). Thus the use of the font does not interfere with other language contents. Also the rendering of the fitted characters, ligatures etc function like with glyph encoded fonts requiring no level 2 implementation.

What really can be described as a "native" support should be operating system-level supported character based regular  Unicode rendering using GSUB, GPOS tables.

The released Android versions have been lacking the support for Indic languages because Andriod developer's chose the new development of HarfBuzz rendering engine.The newer development of HarfBuzz was used to be referred to as HarfBuzz-NG (for New Generation) but now generally the -NG suffix is dropped in developer's lingo (instead the  first generation is reffered to HarfBuzz-Old or -legacy).

In the rewrite of old HarfBuzz the redevelopment of Indic support seems to have taken nearly two years in the running (that's a long time delay) and still not reached implementation status for most Indic + South Asian languages.

But for some phones (e.g.,  Samsung Galaxy S2 ) the upgrade of Android version to 2.3.4 (code named Gingerbread) provides system wide support for some languages including Tamil, thus they do need any conversion solutions.

The freedesktop.org project site is at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz
For an useful read for those needing to know the history of HarfBuzz and its relation to Pango, Qt, ICU I suggest this: "State of Text Rendering" - By Behdad Esfahbod   http://behdad.org/text/

~Sethu