--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:
> Having said it would be straigtforward, I've now bolted on a Tamil
> keyboard of my own devising. (The Devanagari stuff remains!) I've
> only done U+0B83 (aytham) to U+0BCD (virama); anusvara we don't

need,

> and the numbers and abbreviations will have to use the shift key.

I

> had to stretch and shrink things a bit to fit in the long Tamil
> characters. I've treated <ksha> as a consonant as I've seen it

listed

> as separate letter <x>. Are there any more conjuncts I should be
> aware of? I've room for one more.

Can't think of one.

>In a sense they're not an issue,
> because pulli automatically vanishes when there should be a

conjunct,

> unlike Devanagari where you have the choice. The prompts need
> translating, but that's beyond me.

Don't worry about the prompts - kids just press all the buttons -
they don't care.

>
> I'll put my efforts on the net on Saturday morning.

Thanks - this sounds great! AFAIK You have all the codepoints. The
nice thing about working with Tamil is the limited set of
codepoints - the bad thing is how long and awkward some symbols are.

Now I am wondering how you have done the keymapping. For example,
what have you done for the five n's - that is usually the worst
problem. (I know some systems have n, N, ng, nj, ny - that is more
of a transliteration scheme but it does work fairly smoothly.) I
suppose you have simple placed each 'n' on a different key - that
will work too. Since I have asked for a 'visual' representation,
that would be consistent.

Suzanne

>
> Richard.