Modified Pinyinput

[L-F-J]

Hi,

I've been using the Pinyinput system for years now. It is a wonderfully easy and convenient tool.

However I'm now wondering how it was made, and if it is possible to modify it to create a similar input method for transliterated Sanskrit.

All the letters with diacritical marks can be found as symbols in fonts such as Tahoma. These "symbols" can be pulled up on Microsoft Word and be given new shortcut keys. So for example, typing Alt+S would result in Ś, if you set the shortcut keys that way.

But this is not an actual input system that can be used in web browsers and elsewhere, like Pinyinput. It is also not as convenient as simply pressing 1, 2 or 3, etc. to apply the diacritics.

Any chance?

Thanks!

[imron]

Pinyinput was written in C++ and the source code has been released under the GPL so is available for anyone else to download and/or modify if they wish, so long as they also release the source code for their changes.

It compiles cleanly using Visual Studio Express 2008 and is fairly modular, so I don't expect it would be too hard for someone who knew what they were doing to adapt it for another writing system.

I'm also happy to accept patches to integrate into the main project, however if it was for a different writing system, it'd probably make more sense to have it as a standalone IME rather than part of Pinyinput.

[L-F-J]

Pinyinput is already a great start to a very easy to use IME for transliterated Sanskrit, and possibly other Indic languages.

It already has the macron (ā, ū), and I have found that I can enable tone marks over consonants now, which will easily allow me the necessary acute (ś) (just input with Pinyinput). B)

But there are only maybe two other diacritics needed for Sanskrit, namely the tilde over the N (ñ) and dots below several consonants (ṛ, ḥ, ṃ, ṇ, ṣ, ṭ, ḍ).

Unfortunately I think I lack the techsaviness to make the modifications. :mellow:

[imron]

How many people do you think would be interested in this sort of thing? If there's enough interest, I could consider launching a Kickstarter project to fund it, and then do the necessary development work (unlike Pinyinput and Chinese, I wouldn't have the motivation or interest in Sanskrit to work on it unfunded).

[L-F-J]

A lot of major Indian Religions are originally in Sanskrit and Pali language (which use the same diacritical marks). Furthermore, many texts in East Asian religions and philosophies trace back to original Sanskrit texts- such as Chinese and other East Asian Buddhist texts.

So there is a considerable population of researches and serious students who need to use the transliterated spellings for papers, discussions, etc.. It would be great to have a universal input system as easy to use as Pinyinput.

Everywhere I have looked online for this kind of input seems overly complicated, or it requires a Mac, or something else not as easily accessible.

I could post the idea on other populated message boards for these people and see what type of response we get.

[imron]

Sounds like a reasonable idea. Could you please send me a link to any posts you make so I could follow the discussion also? For reference, if doing a kickstarter project, I'd probably be looking for 100-200 people willing to put up around $10-20 each.

If that wouldn't work out, you might also find programmers on those other boards who would be willing to modify the Pinyinput source themselves.