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

>
> --- 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'll put my efforts on the net on Saturday morning.
>
> It's now available at
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wordingham/syll/keyboard.htm

for

> anyone who's interested.

It's great! I have only tried out the list of Canadian provinces and
a few other things. However, everything displays perfectly.
Wonderful.

The Tamil 99 phonetic keyboard is the best since it is romanized and
does not require frequent use of the shift key. The few characters
that are reduced in size are not relevant when it is used as a
syllabic picker since the dependent vowels are picked out of the
syllable display bar. (They are a little small but I don't find
that it causes any difficulty - it doesn't matter.)

So as a picker it is A1. I could really see children who read Tamil
but are completely untrained at typing it being able to use this for
google searches. It will take me a while to test it on a significant
number of individuals - maybe a month or two. (holidays and camp
coming up)

I have to say that it is incredibly satisfying to feel that I am
visually inputing Tamil characters and am not using the roman
alphabet as mediation. It really does feel different. The alphabet -
who needs it!

I've added the Microsoft Tamil keyboard, but

> had to merge the shift and alt-green keyboards.

I don't think these changes matter since the visual reference is
available.

Moved items are in

> yellow. I haven't got round to making it work on Firefox. My
> 'phonetic' Tamil keyboard supports the complete Tamil block, but I
> don't have font to check how well the abbreviations display.

Of course, it would be wonderful to have in firefox. I am not sure
what you mean by the abbreviations.

It is really great. I have never felt so comfortable with Tamil. I
had more or less given up and gone to tranliteration but this is
better. Thank you.

Suzanne Mccarthy

>
> Richard.