Sunday, September 9, 2007

typing in Devanagari

I found a post on the ePandit Hindi blog yesterday that appears to be a review of various systems for typing in Devanagari. I can't remotely read the post, and if someone would like to summarize it for me, I'd be grateful. But links know no linguistic bounds, so I was able to find Bahara, (which Filmi Geek had already told me about), HindiWriter, and Bhasha. I haven't had time to play with any of these, and I will be gob-smacked if any of them work on a Mac (and then I'll dance a merry jig).

I also thought I should let you know why I haven't been getting much Hindi done over the summer. My regular tutor was gone for the summer, studying in Jaipur, but I lined up a really good substitute. Or so I thought.

He may be a native speaker, but it turns out that he was really keen to use his English while in the US. He was also still feeling a little shy, and he was convinced that if he spoke in Hindi his low profile would be blown and throngs of screaming girls would ruin his vacation. And whenever I tried to crack the book, he insisted on turning it to this particular page, even though I'm only in chapter three....

11 comments:

v9y said...

You will have to save the dance. Unfortunately none of the IMEs mentioned in the article would work with a Mac. Your best bet is to use an online IME instead. Google has come up recently with an Indic transliterator. Quillpad is another good one. You may also want to give a try to a rather simple tool that I created - HiTrans.

Let me know if you find an installabe IME for Mac though. Some of my friends would be happy to know.

a ppcc representative said...

Oh my goodness. Number one, I am shocked someone is reading the PPCC. Number two, I am shocked that I seem to have discovered the OTHER-ME! Because I TOO am learning Hindi from the Teach Yourself book. I don't have the plastic Shah Rukh though. I wasn't even aware he existed, but clearly I need to remedy all this very soon.

Beth Loves Bollywood said...

PPCC - I'm completely in love with your blog. Let's be friends! And if you want to contribute to Main Pratap Hoon, let me know!

Maja said...

Ohh, not fair! My Hindi book has no chapters on handsome men *sulks*
What's the PPCC?

Anonymous said...

Try this :-

http://www.writeka.com/scripton/hindi/

Write "aap ka naam kya hai" and watch it convert the romanised script to devanagari!

Not quite the same as a Devanagari editor, but pretty useful nonetheless.

Beth Loves Bollywood said...

v9y - alas, no leads yet.

esra - I hate to tell you that I tried your link on my Mac using both Firefox, which spewed out question marks (its standard representation of Devanagari), and Safari, which also gave nothing but gibberish. Looks like a great site for those who can get it to work, though.

Anonymous said...

I think you need a trip to your local Apple Store. Try the website from one of the computers there and maybe ask one of their sales guys why your computer can't display those characters. Good luck!

Beth Loves Bollywood said...

Worth a shot, certainly!

Unknown said...

i read ondate 10-4-2009 newspaper blogs, and downloading baraha imi unicode 2.0, thanks, angain thanks to newspaper amarujala blogs

nkm

Unknown said...

i am a govt. servece, and work computer hindi and english, recently hindi typing in kurtidev font.

but for future i work in baraha imi unicode

Anonymous said...

I congratulate, this rather good idea is necessary just by the way