Ankur India

Web Page: http://ankur.org.in/projects/project-ideas/

Mailing List: http://lists.ankur.org.in/listinfo.cgi/project-ideas-ankur.org.in

Ankur.org.in is a group of volunteers who collaborate to promote localization and internationalization with the specific aim of improving usage of Bengali in Free and Open Source Software projects. The group is involved in internationalization and localization especially translations, content development, development of tools, utilities, widgets and APIs that help facilitate a wider community of like minded collaborators to participate in a community building process.

Projects

• A translation editor for DTD resources Implementing an extensible library for translating locale files of different formats, creating plugins for Mozilla DTD and properties translation files for this library, and integrating it in an existing translation application like Lokalize
• New Visual Keyboard for Bengali The popular keyboard layouts in use for Indic scripts such as Bengali follow a non-visual style of typing i.e. the characters are not typed in the sequence they are displayed. The non-visual style follows a uniform method of typing the characters as per their type (consonants, independent vowels, dependent vowels, special characters, conjunct characters) and are defined by specific rules. This method of writing is already prevalent. However, this often poses a learning challenge for new users who are more practised in the conventional visual writing method. This project aims to create a Visual typing method for complex scripts like Bengali.