Technofriends

Quillpad is an interesting, simple and free to use online Indian language typing tool. The website allows you to type in various Indian languages which include Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Nepali. With Quillpad, all you need to do is type the phrase in English as you would say it in a particular language and Quillpad will do the automatic transliteration for you.

While most of the Indians speak Hindi and lots of regional languages, but typing out in the language using a computer keyboard is pretty challenging. QuillPad makes typing in Hindi and supported regional languages easy. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Quillpad can also predict if multiple words are possible for your input. You can click on the word to select from those options.

Check out a demo of how QuillPad transliteration is done on the fly as you type the text in English.

In order to get started, navigate to QuillPad and click on the tab link which says “Editor”. This will present you with a editor window. You can also select the language you wish the output to be in from the tabbed menu present in the Editor window. Once you have selected the language, start typing the text in English as you would speak in that particular language, as mentioned above, QuillPad does the automatic transliteration for you.( i tried typing out some stuff and it does rock!!!)

You can even copy and paste the transliterated text into any program of your choice. However, unfortunately, Microsoft Word doesn’t support rendering of the Indian unicode scripts by default.  In order to get this working, You will have to install ‘Supplemental language support’ in Windows XP. Navigate to Start -> Control Panel -> Regional & Language Options -> Languages -> Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai).
(You would need your Operating System installation disc for this)

While Microsoft Word has issues with default support for Indian Unicodes scripts, Microsoft WordPad and NotePad doesn’t have any problem rendering indian language content, so if you don’t have complex formatting in your documents you can use the minimalistic wordpad. You can also try out the free, open source software OpenOffice.org which handles rendering of indic scripts by default.

QuillPad is free to use for personal usage. You can even buy licenses for commercial usage.

In my honest opinion, a tool like QuillPad makes a lot of sense. It fills a need, a need i have personally come across a lot of times. Thanks to Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India who has developed QuillPad.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

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