Tuesday, May 27, 2014

New Input Methods for Indic Scripts

Thanks to Ranganath Atreya we now have some alternatives to Apple's keyboards for Indic scripts.  His user-configurable IM covers a variety of transliteration systems for Unicode Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu.  You can download it at

https://github.com/ratreya/Lipika_IME

OS 10.8 or higher is required.  A chart of the mappings can be found here.

If any users try this out, I would welcome seeing their comments here.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the hint! seems to work in various applications such as pages, notes evernote texteditor) (I haven't yet tried more complex ligatures), but does not work in mac/office/word. it also seems impossible to properly copy paste into word from one of these applications. I'vebeen using baraha.com for years on windows.

Tom Gewecke said...

Word for Mac has never supported Indic scripts at all, it's pointless to try to use it for this as far as I know. They have had 14 years to fix it. Same for Arabic/Hebrew.

Nitin Washikar said...

Great help... Many thanks to the developer...!!

Anonymous said...

Lipika is now available on iOS as well: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lipikaboard/id1224483004

NeeDhaPa said...

Just found this. I had been trying to find offline unicode typing method for my macbook. I had been spoilt by baraha on my windows PC/ laptop. So far this is the closest you can get to Baraha like ease in Deonagari typing. Thank you!

So far it is working in pages and browser. Covers my main requirements.

Hope they come up with specific details for Marathi as well which is not too far from Hindi deonagari but some nuances are there. Mainly the half moon on top of letter as in August, match, ball etc.

Narendra Kumar said...

I have started using LipikaIME since last few months. Before that I had used Baraha.
In Lipika, I am finding it difficult to get some of the characters.
For example, F or Z (ಜ಼).
Can you please let me know, how to type these in Lipika?

Tom Gewecke said...

Narendra -- You have to contact the people who make that app, I don't know anything about how it works.

Tom Gewecke said...

Narendra -- You have to contact the people who make that app, I don't know anything about how it works.

Manikandan Iyer said...

How to type the following
ङ ञ ज्ञ and ऽ ? Could someone please help ?

Tom Gewecke said...

If you are asking about Lipika, you need to contact the people who make it.