--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

>
> Suz. McCarthy wrote:
>
> "... The IME's are now being developed by Bhashaindia..."
>
> Fairly sure that's a subsidiary of Microsoft, or the rough

equivalent.

Yes, thanks, that is my point. At first, Microsoft said "no"
because the theory is that an IME is not needed, (Tamil is not a
syllabary, hence a syllabic IME should not exist), but eventually a
syllabic IME was developed in response to demand. It just doesn't
work very well yet.

The problem is that really the Tamil still use code conversion and
transliteration. They haven't switched to input in 'logical order'
which is an artifact of ISCII. I don't really know what to use but
Unicode deals with characters, abstract phonemes, not glyphs, actual
visual shapes. You can hardly imagine what it is like for a child
under 12, and some adults, to deal with this concept. But little
kids can keyboad an alphabet.

Suzanne

>
> Regards,
> NB
>
> {The message backlog is accumulating, again! :) }
> --
> Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
> Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2