PyTamEditor README

Copyright © 2009 V.Harishankar. 

Licensed Under the GNU General Public License v3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)

Note: You will require a Unicode-aware viewer to read the Tamil characters in this document

Introduction

PyTamEditor is a simple GUI editor written in Python / PyQt4 for typing UTF text files in the Tamil language. While not a feature-rich editor in itself, you can use it as a quick type-pad to copy/paste the generated UTF-8 characters into a word-processing program, say OpenOffice.org to beautify/format appropriately PyTamEditor uses a simple one-on-one character map which is intuitive (hopefully) and makes typing Tamil characters and words extremely easy.

Requirements

PyTamEditor requires: 

1. Python 2.5 or higher (http://www.python.org)
2. Python Qt 4 bindings (PyQt4) (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download)
3. Any Unicode (UTF-8) Font with Tamil character set. You can download OpenType fonts here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tamillinux/

Installation and Usage

Since PyTamEditor is a Python script, it requires no installation. Merely extract the tar.gz archive in a folder (under Windows you'll need a program like WinZip or FilZip to open the archive) and run the pytameditor.py script. In Windows, you can simply double-click the script file and Python will automatically execute it (if installed correctly). 

Under *nix, you can run the script from its folder from a console/terminal: 

./pytameditor.py 

Make sure the script has the executable bit set. You can also create a desktop shortcut to the script, but make sure that the "Working Directory" is set to the same folder where the script is located. 

Key map

Vowels

`a        =        அ 

`A        =        ஆ

`i        =        இ 

`I        =        ஈ 

`u        =        உ 

`U        =        ஊ 

`e        =        எ 

`E        =        ஏ 

`o        =        ஒ 

`O        =        ஓ 

^I        =        ஐ 

^O        =        ஔ 

Consonants

k        =        க 

c        =        ச 

d        =        ட 

t        =        த  

p        =        ப 

R        =        ற 

g        =        ங 

j        =        ஞ 

N        =        ண 

n        =        ன 

m        =        ம 

`n        =        ந 

y        =        ய 

r        =        ர 

l        =        ல 

v        =        வ 

z        =        ழ 

L        =        ள 

S        =        ஷ 

J        =        ஜ 

h        =        ஹ 

s        =        ஸ 

Consonants + modifiers

Type a consonant character followed by a modifier to create the compound character 

a        =        ா  

i        =        ி  

I        =        ீ  

u        =        ு 

U        =        ூ 

e        =        ெ 

E        =        ே 

o        =        ொ 

O        =        ோ  

w        =        ௌ  

I        =        ை 

~        =        ் 

Special

x        =        ஃ 

s~rI        =        ஸ்ரீ 

k~S        =        க்ஷ