Hari's Software

PyTamEditor

Description

PyTamEditor is a simple UTF-8 editor written in Python/Qt4 for Tamil input which uses a reasonably intuitive phonetic keymapping from English to Tamil characters. Due to the really unique nature of Unicode, creating compound characters is no longer a painful procedure depending on archaic/non-standard typing systems, fonts or encoding. Since I found no really decent Free Software/Open Source Tamil Unicode editor which works cross-platform, I decided to create one myself. Originally I wrote a simpler version of this program in C and GTK, but decided that Python/Qt was better for an enhanced interface.

While not feature rich as a word processor, you can use PyTamEditor as type-pad for entering Tamil text and pasting the result to a word processor like OpenOffice.org.

Screenshot

Requirements/Dependencies

• Python 2.5 and above (2.4 might work, but it was developed using 2.5)
• Python Qt4 module (PyQt4)
• At least one Unicode (UTF-8) font with Tamil characters. You can download OpenType Tamil fonts here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tamillinux/

Download & Installation

Download Python source package (ZIP): PyTamEditor.zip (27.98 kB)

For installation and usage instructions refer to the readme.html provided in the ZIP archive.

Windows users note: You need to download and install the 32-bit versions of both Python AND PyQt 4 as there is no 64-bit pre-compiled binary installer for PyQt (as of the time of writing this). You will need to download the PyQt sources, set up a build environment and compile it yourself under Windows if you want 64-bit PyQt4. Please forward all your well wishes and polite enquiries to River Bank Computing :-)