Re: Tamil keyboards, continued...

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, grendl löfkvist <grendl_lofkvist@...>
wrote:

> Hi all:
>
> > I bet you ten euros that Tamils working in production offices
> > typesetting Tamil publications use keyboards.
> --
> > Michael Everson
>
> I asked my friend and co-worker Ranil, who used to own a printing
>press in Sri Lanka (until
> he had to flee as a political refugee), and he said:
>
> "Yep, Tamil is a second language in Sri Lanka other than English,
>so there are Tamil
> typewriter keyboards, and movable type cases as well.

I believe Tamil was the earliest Indic script to be typeset - mid
1500's (very early in any case.) This is one of the interesting
things about Tamil, it's antiquity and status as a classical
language.

>Nowadays there are computer
> keypad layouts for all our languages."

and I have tried most of them, pre and post Unicode. What I am
looking for is a particular kind of visual presentation - something
that doesn't require typist training. Hard to explain, sorry, but
the transition from pre to post Unicode was an interesting shift for
Tamil, more so than for many other writing systems.

Anyway thanks for asking.

Suzanne

>
> Grendl.