Jai Hanuman.
हिन्दी में !

Takhti allows you to enter Hindi text (Devanagri Unicode) on Windows systems. It was written mainly to
ease typing in Hindi in XP (the INSCRIPT keyboard is not easy to use for Qwerty literates),
but then it was realized that most people
in India use Win9X and cannot access their own language because
no method on inputting text is available. A lot of effort was made to make
it run on the 8-bit Win9X systems.

It is meant mainly for email usage, and presently word processing
features are not working fully. Unlike other programs, you can print,
save and copy-paste ....

On Win9X it shows up Devanagri only in one size, and that will be looked into only if
users demand it. It has something to do with font linking, documentation on which is scarce.

Takhti was written as a technological demonstrator
– to show that it is possible to easily write in hindi in a standard text format, just like ascii.

Howto: (also - FAQ)

To type in Hindi, you must have the program, a Unicode compatible font,
the required level of system upgrades (Richedit version 3.0 or above,
IE 5 or above).
You can switch between ascii and Unicode Hindi mode by the Cntrl Q
or the toolbar button.

Fonts etc: (Unable to see hindi page)
To set the font for a particular (unicode) script, go to
Tools->Internet Options->General Tab->fonts->
(select Devanagri)Language script
(select favourite font) Web page font
Still not able to see:
set view->encoding->utf-8 manually
(some servers, like google, yahoo groups etc might incorrectly
change encoding to ISO-8859 )

Note: It is advised to use the BBC Raghu8 font (Raghu1.ttf).
However on Win9X, Takhti does not work with BBC's font,
and you have to use the Raghindi font (Raghu.ttf)
On WinNT/2000/XP it is advised to use the BBC's font.
Win2000 and XP may also have the Microsoft's (non-redistributable) Mangal font.

Conjuncts ("half characters"):
Use the halant character x to compose.
eg, type ptxr and see what it shows.

Email:
Takhti now supports email from within (File->send as Text) (Outlook express only).
Otherwise,
Copy and paste the text from Takhti to Outlook Express using Cntrl-C
and Cntrl-V...
To send your mail as unicode text, set message encoding as UTF-8 .
(The receiving party has to have a Unicode compatible Devanagri Font).

To set UTF-8, Tools->Options->Send->International Settings

Posting to Usenet:
To post news messages (NNTP) usually you can only post through your
ISP's news server or via google groups.
Takhti now supports posting to usenet via the mail2news
(File->Post text to usenet) (Outlook express only).
Otherwise,
The easiest way is to use the mail2news daemon . Be sure to set the message
encoding to UTF-8 (and plain text format )
send your post to -
mail2news_nospam-YYYYMMDD-group1+group2...@anon.lcs.mit.edu

using today's date.
eg,
mail2news_nospam-20020425-alt.language.hindi+soc.culture.indian@anon.lcs.mit.edu

Update: Sept 6 2003:

Reading Usenet groups:
you can use a public access server to read if your ISP does not
provide an NNTP server. eg, newscache0.freenet.de keeps
alt.language.hindi . To setup Outlook Express to read from this server,
follow Tools->Accounts->add->news and create the account.

if you are unable to access this way, you can read on an http gateway
like google, click on groups tab and search on the group
alt.language.hindi

HTML Pages:
Type the text in Takhti . Open Netscape Composer (or other HTML editor),
set the view->character set to utf-8 , and copy paste the text into the
HTML editor.

Chalo ab kaam ki baat:
Download the Takhti program for  Win9x(Win95,Win98,WinME) and for NT4,Win2000,WinXP
Dowload the Richedit version for your operating system here.
(WinME/Win2000 and above have the correct version).
Since it is a big download, people with bandwidth problems
can run takhti rightaway- if it can't find the right version, it'll complain.

 Raghindi font here.
To install the font Start->settings>Control Panel->Fonts->File->Install new font

Or you may install the self-installing exe from BBC's Hindi site here
Note - BBC's font has some bug and does not show up properly on Win9X.
Or maybe Microsoft has the bug. Who knows? This is not well documented.

And of course, this is completely free software.You may not sell it and or claim ownership.
You are free to distribute it and use it.
It comes without any warrantees, implied or otherwise or suitability for any purpose.

Test (Excerpts from the yoga sutra)
९. शब्द ज्ञानानुपाती वस्तु शून्यो विकल्पः ॥

Instaling the program:
Just unzip the all the files to any folder, install the  font in the zip file, and
try running the program.

Details:
Keyboard layout can be seen Options->Show Keyboard.
To print it, Alt+PrintScreen, paste in Microsoft Paint, and print it.

Newbies (or ascii accustomed )should understand the halant character x . It is the vowel killer -
Unicode does not have codes for all the 600 odd ligatures required by Hindi. The
ligatures are stored in the fonts , and are chosen according to language rules.
eg, to type the word Pradesh in Takhti, you would write pxrdeS . The pxr is actually
3 unicode characters internally , but when displayed, the p and r are joined into a ligature
thanks to the halant, and the glyph corresponding to it is displayed from the font. If the font
does not have the ligature for it, it would show as 3 different characters.
 

the character gya in gyaan can be input by jxM
the character ksha can be input by kxQ
the character shra can be input by Sxr
Similarly for hri in words like hriday etc (type hxr )

Changes:2 Oct 2002
 

Changes: (2 Mar 2003)

Changes:(28 Mar 2003)

Changes:(6 Sept 2003)

Sample Hindi Texts:


For feedback contact the author

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