Sunday, July 16, 2006

Rocky Assists in Horoscope Matches

Rocky Assists in Horoscope Matches

There were some "high level" family talks in the morning between Chennai and Bangalore regarding horoscope matches again. I was asked to have my horoscope typed and sent across the email since an astrologer sitting over there wanted to do a match. Well! A significant deliverable right?

Should I type the horoscope into Tamil? Luckily BhashaIndia's Indic IME (Input Method Editor) came to the rescue. The moment, you install that, Rocky (Microsoft Word) understands Tamil in any of the convenient forms either by Transliteration or via Tamil 99 Keyboard or Tamil Inscript.  With the help of these and Microsoft Word (and the cute little Rocky at the right bottom), the document was prepared and sent across. She did it from her end too, as I learnt from her later in the evening from her text message.

Indic IME is really an excellent transliteration tool and it is very friendly once you learn the tips and tricks of it and understand to type in Tamil. If at all, you are encountered in a fix, the next defense that you can help yourself out of the tight corner is Tamil Keyboard. Well! All said. What happens if the destination system does not have this editor. I have also tested it with an online word viewer and it works fine. I guess, it embeds the fonts into the document. As a precautionary method, I also, had this converted into an Unicode Webpage and have the same in my webpage. I don't need to hyperlink this anyway since the recipeint knows it via the private email. And, as usual with any webpage, I tested the cross browser compatibility in my own interest. FireFox certified the document rendering after a pass through was run in Html-Kit Prototype Pad.

The inner essence of the post is to emphasize the greatness of Indic IME in helping out managing desktop documents in native Indian languages through a 'realtime' use.

2 comments:

Deepak Vasudevan said...

Just an addon. There was some 'heaviness in heart' whether this was despatched during the Sunday Rahukalam. But considering it as a transactional entity, the process having initiated from preparation of the document and the preparatory process logged on to my weblog, the actual weblog post was recorded on 5:57 Indian Time IST.

It is said that, at the closing of Rahu Kalam, the planet Rahu bestows enormous blessings and prosperity.

Deepak Vasudevan said...

Yet another small update. This is purely for the sake of my own inspiration of making this device compatible, instead of locking down into Unicode restrictions.

Thanks to Irfanview, it has been converted into a GIF image which can now be viewed across any web browser without restrictions of Unicode or font restrictions. Perhaps, you can find this in my personal homepage at this URL:

Personal Horoscope

As an additional restriction to prevent IE from resizing a couple of meta tags and a IE specific IMG attribute has been added and hence the interlaced image should render without any resizing or a toolbar being popped up.

Should you encounter any difficulties or discrepancies, let me know.