Tamilnet'97- International Tamil Conference on the use of Tamil in Information Technology

Tamils - a Trans State Nation..

"To us all towns are one, all men our kin.
Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill
Man's pains and pains' relief are from within.
Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !."
- Tamil Poem in Purananuru, circa 500 B.C

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Papers presented at Tamilnet'97

Speech by Guest-of-Honour, Prof S Jayakumar, Minister for Law and Foreign Affairs

Unicode and Tamil - Issues with Implementation
Muthelilan Murasu Nedumaran

ISCII And Tamil: A Perspective - N. Anbarasan

An overview of Different Tools for Word-processing of Tamil and A Proposal Towards Standardization by Kuppuswamy Kalyanasundaram, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Selection and Standardization of Tamil Keyboard Layouts: Recommendations - M.Ananthakrishnan, S.Kuppuswami, S.Rangarajan &. Naa Govindasamy

Selection and Standardization of Tamil Keyboard Layouts: S.Kuppuswami & V.Prasanna Venkatesan

The Development of a Tamil Internet: Possibilities and Challenges for the Future by Harold Schiffman, Penn Language Center, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA

Tamil and Computer by Sujatha, TamilNadu standardization committee, India

Towards Tamil Xanadu - First Step: An hyper news service in Tamil by S. Senthil Nathan, Madras, India

My Experiences with Electronic Publishing by Maalan, Kumudam, India

TamilNet'97

Language is an essential tool for human life. Refinements in languages are necessary to make them more suitable for use with modern gadgets in order to provide sophisticated life for the people. The process of refinement has taken place continuously in may languages throughout the world.

Tamil is one of the most popular ancient languages used by a large community in India and also a considerable population all over the world. Right from its inception continuous changes have been made in Tamil to adapt to the linguistic, cultural and environmental changes.

The evolution in computer technology and its increased applications demand the adaptation of Tamil in computers. Towards this objective, the Department of Computer Science, Pondicherry University has submitted a research proposal to the Tamilnadu State Council for Higher Education (TNSCHE) to develop a Tamil Computer.

Based on the proposal submitted by the Pondicherry University, the Vice-Chairman of TNSCHE made his recommendations to the Government of Tamilnadu to constitute a committee to address the following issues and make suitable recommendations for developing Tamil Computer.

Accepting the recommendations, the Government of Tamilnadu constituted a committee consisting of the following members.

1) Dr. M. Anandhakrishnan Chairman, Vice-Chairman,Tamilnadu State Council for Higher Education, Chennai

2) Dr. S. Kuppuswami Member, Professor & Head of Computer Science, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry

4) Mr. N. Govindasamy Member, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,Singapore

5) Mr Bhakaran, Head of Computer Science Department Member, Tamil University, Thanjavour, Tamil Nadu

The Committee decided to go into the various issues mentioned above on a priority basis. As the standardization of Tamil keyboard layout is a primary issue, the committee has first taken up this work.

At present lot of Tamil software have been made available mainly for word processing applications. Each one adapts its own keyboard layout. This necessitates the user to learn different keyboard layouts and thus complicates the keying-in process. This is due to the non-availability of standard Tamil keyboard layout.

In order to select and standardize a Tamil keyboard layout, the committee has decided to categorize the existing Tamil keyboard layouts and analyze them. Tamil keyboard layouts proposed by the various software developers and researchers have been collected and categorized into four groups. They are presented below.

Keyboard layouts designed based on the phonemes and frequency of usage of Tamil characters are classified as Phonetic keyboard layouts. The following layouts fall under this category.

Layouts which follow the Tamil typewriter machine keyboard are classified as Typewriter-like keyboard layouts. Some of them are

In Romanized keyboard layouts, mapping of the Tamil characters to the corresponding English characters is done on transliteration basis. The following layouts are the examples of this category.

The keyboard layouts which do not fall under the above categories are grouped as Others. Some of them are

An efficient keyboard layout has to meet the following requirements. Any keyboard which meets these requirements will have features like easy handling, simple learning and standard usage.

In the keyboard layout, mapping of the characters to Strong and Weak key positions should be based on the frequency of usage.

The keyboard layout should have distribution of keys on the left side and right side such that the keys are used alternately by left and right hand, during the keying-in process.

An extensive analysis was carried out in three phases on the Tamil keyboard layouts, mentioned in the previous section, to determine their efficiency for keying-in of Tamil text. For this analysis, Tamil text were selected from various Tamil literature of different period. The objective, methodology and observations of the analysis carried out in three phases are presented below.

In this phase, character count has been performed on each of the keyed-in Tamil text and it has been converted into number of actual key strokes corresponding to different keyboard layouts. The character count and number of actual key strokes are tabulated in Table - I.

Phonetic keyboard layouts perform better than the other three types of keyboards. Kanian, Nalinam and Krishnamoorthy's layouts lead in this type.

Romanized keyboard layouts come in third place. Among them Yarzhan and PONN layouts lead the list.

Identifying keyboard layouts which have high frequency of usage for strong fingers and low frequency of usage for weak fingers.

The second phase analysis is done using the same text used for the first phase. The frequency of usage of each key position is calculated from which the usage of strong and weak fingers, in percentage, are determined. The results thus obtained are given in Table - II.

The Typewriter-like keyboard layouts and the Romanized keyboard layouts closely follow the phonetic layouts.

Identifying keyboard layouts which have keys distributed on the left side and right side of the keyboards such that the keys are used alternately by left and right hand.

The same text are used in this phase. The usage of each key position is calculated from which the toggling of left and right hand, in key strokes, are determined. The number of key strokes made without toggling are also determined. Table-III shows the results obtained.

Phonetic keyboard layouts outperform all other layouts. Amongst them Kanian shows better results.

Based on the results obtained from the analysis, the Tamil Computer Standardization Committee recommends the following for selecting and standardizing keyboard layouts for Tamil computer.

Phonetic keyboard layouts give better performance in all the three phases of analysis. Hence it has been decided to select the best phonetic keyboard layout and that may be refined further.

As large number of typewriter trained personnel are readily available, it is also felt that the best Typewriter-like keyboard layout can also be selected and improved.

For the Tamil people living all over the world, who are using English keyboard to input the Tamil text, Romanized keyboard layout is essential. Therefore, one keyboard layout can be selected from this category and refined.

Hence, umbrella standard of keyboard layouts have to be made available from each category of keyboards. The work is in progress in this direction.