Friday, June 18, 2004

Font Wars coming to an end ?! (tamil)

It's been so long since tamil language was brought into the computer arena. But the main obstacles were to display tamil font over the internet. Many thanks to Unicode. Now tamil can be used in google search too. I was very impressed with some of the findings on the net on making tamil move more towards Unicode. Especially I was amazed with the work that has gone in making tamil blogs ! My very first entry into a Unicode based tamil page was www.ezilnila.com SIMPLY WONDERFUL!! Following some of the links took me to tamil blogs!!
Wow. It's all Unicode. There are a couple of tools that are useful when it comes to Unicode tamil stuff. The one that I use and my all time favorite free sw is e-Kalappai by default it does not come with Unicode support but there is a plug-in to be installed to enable Unicode. All this is require if you wanna put your work on Unicode. But just to read those pages off the net you need NOTHING. All you need is a quite latest browser.
But if you want to Google with tamil just turn the e-Kalappai Unicode version on and type in the google search bar any tamil word by typing the pronunciation of the word. For example "thisaihal" . The characters might look funny on your screen sometimes but they make good sense to google engine. Hit Go and see the results.. You will be amazed indeed.

Here are some of the blogs and e-zines that keeps you within tamil worlds.

KAsi's blogs(got pointers to other too)
maraththadi,
valaipoo
thisaihal
e-sangam
There are a bunch of yahoo groups too.
maraththadi news group
Another site that needs special mention is tamil linux
tamil linux news group

An audio visual tutorial on unicode in tamil
I am gonna try my first tamil uni code font entry here.. see if you guys can read it without a problem...

வணக்கம் அன்பர்களே
இது உங்கள் வாகீசன் !!

2 comments:

மதி கந்தசாமி (Mathy Kandasamy) said...

வணக்கம் வாகீசன்!

நீங்க எப்ப தமிழிலை வலைப்பதிவு தொடங்கப்போறீங்க? வாங்க நந்து ஜோதில கலந்துகொள்ளுங்க.

உரும்பிராயப் பத்தி, ஒட்டாவா பத்தி எல்லாம் எழுதுங்க.

நட்புடன்,

மதி

(http://maraththadi.com
http://tamil.weblogs.us
http://movietalk.yarl.net
http://valaippoo.yarl.net)

Vaheesan said...

இதோ தொடங்கிவிட்டேன்

http://tamilthoughts.blogspot.com