Tamil Transliteration/Viewer Software

TAMILVU

TAMILVU 1.0 Romanized Tamil text viewer MSDOS 42244 bytes.

PURPOSE: Use this program to view Romanized Tamil texts in Tamil script on your screen, one paragraph at a time. Many formats are supported. See list. A paragraph starts with a number or is set of lines separated by a blank line By Romanized Tamil, one means Tamil typed in Roman script as it sounds. The files can be up to 33 Megabytes long as permitted by DOS 3.

The paragraph to be viewed can be selected in one of the following ways:- (i) matching string at the beginning, (ii) matching string anywhere, (iii) matching string at the end.

You can print the selected paragraph on an EPSON(c) dot matrix printer or on a HP(c) Laser printer connected to your LPT1 port. in Roman and Tamil script You can also store all the selected paragraphs in another file.

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS: Selecting poems, songs, quotations etc. from a data base. Tamil-English-Tamil Dictionary and Thesaurus.

This program is fully stand alone under MSDOS. The whole software including this userguide is in one file TAMILVU.EXE.

INPUT DATA FORMATS SUPPORTED:

    Format         Extension to be used              Remarks
   ADAMI9.0               anything         Use S, H for Grantham symbols
   MADURAI                anything         Use S, H for Grantham symbols
   ITRANS                 anything         Use S, H for Grantham symbols
    MYLAI                    .MYL          Do not use Old style ny, ly etc.
Adami-Sri Bilingual TrueType .SRI

OUTPUT DATA FORMAT: The output is stored in the most easily readable Romanized Tamil format. If you use this software to convert formats, it is your responsiblity to check if the original author has any objection.

OTHER FORMATS: If you send me full character code as stored in the file (not Keyboard mapping, which can be different), and a sample text, I can add support for that format in the next version.

ROMANIZED TAMIL: Basically one types Tamil in Roman script as it sounds. English does not use the Roman script in a strict phonetic manner. Use the most common pronunciation as far as possible.

The tamil vowels are:- a, aa(A), i, ee (ii, I), u, oo (uu, U), e, E, ai, o, O, ow (au). The consonents are:- k(g,h), n(NG,ng), c(ch), n(NY), t(d), N, th(dh), n(nN,n^), p(b), m, y, r, l, v, zh(z), L, R, n(Nn), sh, S, H, j, x(ksh). The symbols shown inside brackets are alternatives.

This software automatically takes care of the minor variations in the three commonly used romanized tamil conventions. For example: naan, n^aan, nNaan are acceptable. ingE, iNGgE, inggE are acceptable. It will tolerate onru for onRu, irukkiradhu for irukkiRadhu, tharkam for tharkkam, paarpadhu for paarppadhu etc.

Watch out the use of h, H, s and S. The lower case is used for more common usage and the upper case for the rarer occurance, namely the Grantham symbols You may need to globally replace lower case s and h by uppercase S and H if you have used them to represent Grantham alphabets.

In thamizh the harder sounds k, t, th, t, p do not occur in the middle of words, unless they are preceded by r or doubled. Use g or h, d, dh, b in such places, just like you would read it. i.e. Use paahu or paagu (liquid sugar) and not paaku. The latter will be confused with paakku (betel nut).

The program is very fault tolerant. But do not expect valai palam to correctly appear in Tamil to mean vaazhaip pazham. Use L, N for the pallatal consonents, R for the hard r, zh for the thamizh.

In classical Tamil, there are sometimes free standing vowels inside a word. To enter those, preceed them with a _. The _ will be treated as a zero width space character. You can use this trick to fool the built in phonetic rules if needed. For example: venkat_raaman, maant_riyaal.

BILINGUAL TEXTS: You can mix Roman and Tamil text. The default is Tamil text. The roman portion (not to be transliterated) should start with one of the following words \et, \roman, \(ROMAN). The romanized Tamil portion should start with \bt, \tamil, or \(TAMIL). When entering Roman words for search string use \et and \bt. Just type a \ and the rest will appear automatically.

HISTORY: I was motivated to produce this viewer by a group of volunteers who typed up all the 4000 verses composed by twelve aazhvaars in ADAMI format. This work is referred to as thamizh maRai, Tamil Vedam, Dravida Vedam, naalaayira dhivya prabhandham in South India. See the text files for details.

HOW MUCH DOES THIS COST:

It is absolutely free for the following people: (i) those who have typed up or intend typing up Tamil texts and release them free in the public domain. If that case, please try to inform me to avoid duplicating efforts unnecessarily. (ii) non-profit charitable, literary and religious organizations.

Others are expected to send $20 to the address which appears at the end. This program was prepared entirely by me. I spent more than 300 hours of evenings and weekends of my personal time. Drop me a line by regular mail to let me know what you liked and what you did not, even if not sending a payment.

Usage: TAMILVU File_name EGA/VGA/... [O] [c1 c2 cw1 cw2 cw3 noi] Items within square brackets are optional. Do not type the ] and [

O - Display old style lai, Lai, nai, Nai, Naa etc. c1 and c2 are character colors (0-15) cw1 cw2 and cw3 are window background colors (0-15) If you want not slanted Tamil characters, type noi as last parameter

File_name - Text file to search and display or @File_name - File containing names of files to search and display Type: TAMILVU P to print these instructions on your PRN port printer

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The software is available at the following ftp sites. SimTel & its mirrors.
site (internet_number)                    directory               ftp_mode
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oak.oakland.edu (141.210.10.117)        /simtel/msdos/txtutil         binary
wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.136.4)     /systems/ibmpc/msdos/txtutil  binary
archive.orst.edu (128.193.2.13)         /pub/mirrors/simtel/msdos/txtutil
ftp.uu.net (192.48.96.9)                find out from the site
ftp.funet.fi (128.214.6.100)    Finland         ,,
src.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.2.1)  UK
ftp.switch.ch (130.59.1.40)     Switzerland
archie.au (139.130.4.6)         Australia
nctuccca.edu.tw (140.111.1.10)  Taiwan
ftp.technion.ac.il (132.68.1.10) Italy

Please use the site closest to you.

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