Devanagari, Sanskrit, Hindi

[tshering]

This is my trial to adapt the Kobo reader for Indian languages that use the Devanagari script. There are several issues of which I deal here only with the keyboard.

Step one: Since we need a lot of characters, we set the local language of the OS to Russian so that we can make use also of the Cyrillic keyboard in addition to the English keyboard. A disadvantage of this is that informations that are provided directly by the OS are displayed in Russian. But these cases are not too many.

Step two: We have to assign Devanagari letters to the keys. This involves overwriting parts of the binary file libnickel.so.1.0.0. There are several tools to do this. I used the patcher of "Modifications for bad eyes".
One of the problems is that some characters/parts of characters are not shown on the keyboard, namely non-initial vowels, anusvara, anunasika, and virama. My solution for this is to assign these signs to positions on the keyboard that can easily be remembered. I assigned the virama to the key under the key of the initial "a", the non-initial vowels under the keys of the corresponding initial vowels (that means non-initial "long a" under initial "long a" and so on). I assigned the anunasika to the key left of "ma", the visarga to the key left of "ha", the virama to the key under initial "a", and also to the key left of "va".

I did this for the keyboard layout used by Kobo Touch and so on. For other devices this will need adaptations, or might not work at all.

On the extended keyboard there ares still some positions available for the Hindi specific characters, which I did not deal with.

Awesome, very promising start, thanks! Is "ईतिशब्द " a Sanskrit word?

[tshering]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

Awesome, very promising start, thanks! Is "ईतिशब्द " a Sanskrit word?

It is a compound word. Therefore it is unlikely that you find it in a dictionary. The meaning is "the word 'iti". The whole sentence means "What is the meaning of the word iti".

And iti means "so", "thus" and the like. Its most common use is to mark the end of direct speech.

The note refers to the word iti that occurs in the book (since it was not easy to select the word, only ita was selected). I simply wrote into the note field what came to my mind at that moment to demonstrate non-initial vowels (two i) and consonant clusters (bd and rth).

Originally Posted by tshering

It is a compound word. Therefore it is unlikely that you find it in a dictionary. The meaning is "the word 'iti". The whole sentence means "What is the meaning of the word iti".

And iti means "so", "thus" and the like. Its most common use is to mark the end of direct speech.

Thanks! When I first glanced at the screenshots, I instinctively parsed it as इतिहास, a word I'm very familiar with. To Google's credit, when I searched for ईतिशब्द it actually suggested that I may have meant ईति-शब्द

[tshering]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

Thanks! When I first glanced at the screenshots, I instinctively parsed it as इतिहास, a word I'm very familiar with. To Google's credit, when I searched for ईतिशब्द it actually suggested that I may have meant ईति-शब्द

Thank to your posting I became aware that there is a typo in the images. Correct is इतिशब्दः.