Has any one even try….

to cut and paste with note pad into word and then into helawadane and/or Thibas? further into linux? Apple using the sinhala unicode or SLSI 1134

The answers is SLSI,Sinhala Unicode and Sinhala ISO is incorrect and incomplete

Post your comments here

Donald Gaminitillake
Colombo

I am having problems viewing LANKADEEPA fonts after I copy and paste in microsoft word or sinhala word 2000. Most of the font types installed to my font folder and initialized the following: aKANDY, KANDYSUPPLYMENT, SINHALAPPLE, SINAHALAAPPLE SUPPLIEMNT, KAPUTA and all those. I wanted to copy something interesting from LANKADEEPA newspaper and paste in the Microsoft Word and it shows garbage, same with Sinhala word 2000.

Much appreciate if someone could let me know how to resolve this problem. Moreover, I tried installing sanskrit language pack and sinhala kit for office 2003. Still the same problem and I am very sure there must be a somekind of font but I do not know what it is.

Appreiciate and look forward help from someone!

Glad if anyone could send me an e-mail to chamila.vidana@gmail.com regarding the issue

SLSI 1134 is incorrect and incomplete Sinhala. Nobody accept this fact which is the sad part of the argument but someday actual truth will be come to light. Somebody has commented “Donald vs the Planet” which is very true.

Microimage SMS is limited to Dialog System , limited type of phones and Based on Microimage own individual character allocation table which is not published and not SLSI 1134, This is a game of MONOPOLY.

Re Hon PrimeMinisters Web site Accept the fact that you cannot do it with SLSI 1134 to use on any OS system and to see on any Browser. Unicode is correct but the SLSI 1134 is incorrect. You mean to say that Hon Prime Ministers Office is incapable of giving the content in Sinhala!!! Joke of the year!!! This proves the incapability of the IT guys in and around Hon PM office who are paid by our tax money.

All individual Sinhala Characters are listed on ISBN 955-98975-0-0 with encodings but industrial acceptibility is copyrighted and a patent pending

You can order through http://www.akuru.org

I dont want to get into another blog argument over SLSI1134. Using Sinhala Unicode you can create sites which is viewable on platforms you have mentioned. PM site and other sites are delays of respective content developers and nothing to do with Unicode.

Further, we at Microimage has announced the launch of Worlds 1st Sinhala Unicode Compliant Sinhala & Tamil mobile browsers together with Dialog GSM early last month. Commercial launch will happen soon. Once this is out you can browse unicode content sites on mobile phone which you argued earlier isnt a possibility. Further content are developed by many people like media institutions etc, using unicode fonts. Also we have enabled the PM portal also for the mobile, which you can have a preview if you come to our office. More details about the browser and related press releases visit http://www.microimage.com and http://www.dialog.lk/gsm

SLSI 1134 is good enough but there is definitely scope for improvement. You will see lot of unicode content/applications in the market soon. Sinhala Linux teams and Microsoft platform guys like us, all are moving in this direction. Entire team is finding ways to improve the standard but not to re-invent something totally different.

As now we have proven unicode sites on mobile also, I dont think it’s fair to critizize something. You should prove which is the best way to win others support to your standard.

It is not a heavy book. I can send it across to anywhere.

You have understood the problem partially. If you have a chance to go to a libarary and see the unicode registry of all characters you will understand better. SLSI 1134 is incomplete. It is up to the writers to use or not to use any character. Even yansaya repaya is listed in the wijesekere key board. You can have any keyboard input method. (olivetti sinhala input is different to wijesekera) but the character that render in the screen or in printer has to be the same. To achive this a correct character allocation table has to be introduced. Also to sort text data in a data base this table has to be there. To use Sinhala in the govt sector eg ‘Land registry’ “birth death & marriage certificates’ ‘Drivers licence” “courts documents” “police documents” all these need to be computerised. You cannot do these in english unless we change the constitution of Sri Lanka. I have the solution.

If SLSI 1134 is so great why cant they use it to make the web site of our Hon Priminister who is also the IT Minister in Sinhala!!!! so that we all can read this web site using any operating system , Windows, Apple, Unix or Linux!!!! Send SMS to any mobile net work!!!

As far as I can see (if I may summarize the positions), you are arguing that all the characters that are written using the Sinhala script should be exhaustively documented and each given their own place in the Unicode tables. You assert that this would be essential for the construction of printing presses and also for OCR. You also contend that the current table is deficient in that it lacks some characters such as the yansaya. The SLS1134 standard pushes that work to the renderer of the font and allows the programmers of the font renderer (as opposed to the writer of Sinhala/Pali text in your case) to make a decision on yansaya, ligatures and other peculiarities of Sinhala script. As far as I know, this does appear to be consistent with the position taken by the Unicode consortium on such issues (using ZWJ etc). Did I get it right? :)

Either way, I just hope the dust settles on the differences in opinion soon :)

Thanks for the comments, the book is just printed I can send you a copy let me know the snail mail address. If any one else need copies please visit http://www.akuru.org
Yes you are correct it is “Donald vs the Planet” Please see “it times” published by Wijaya News paper April issue. Jpg image is in my site

Donald

Indi, just a thought, but it might be sorta cool to stick to an established scheme or standard as far as possible. I say this for purely selfish reasons, of course.. I work more with the search end of things and the more fragmented the representation schemes, the more information we lose. There is already Kaputa, Kandy, the new SLS1134 Unicode, Donald’s Akuru business and a few other minor TTF fonts used by people to write Sinhala. On the transliteration side, there are a couple of schemes, Samanala and some other name started with S which I can’t remember :) More fragmentation essentially means that people will be in their tiny little enclaves. All writing in Sinhala. But each with their own script form incomprehensible to the other camps. That’s why I’ve been plugging Samanala like a dealer on a street corner pushing Colombian white.

I really know nothing about the technology behind it , but bellow I list down the user experience when typing Japanese, hoping that would do any help in your effort.

1) I type what I want using phonetic spelling. (Eg “uge pol walla”)
2) Machine – the idiot – displays it in Japanese characters.
3) If there is more than one option to display it in Japanese, the idiot displays all alternatives in a little screen tip. ( Eg: “walla” can be written in 2 ways in Sinahala )
4) I navigate to the correct option using arrow keys & enter.

Believe me this is really convenient than it seems.

Take a look at the mapping files.. (they’re bundled with the application) or mail me and I’ll walk you through it if you want. No, you don’t need to read Java, this is all that new fangled XML thingamabob :)

Is this SLS1134 that is being referred to ? That’s pretty much Donald G. vs the planet at the moment. I’m staying out of that one myself, the flamewars between the two parties go back quite a few months :)

I worked a fair amount with South Asian text last year (and started with Sinhala for obvious reasons).. if you want something that converts between transliteration schemes and fonts, there is code out there that does the job.

Pssst, Chandare. I thought you wanted to scrap subtitles and stuff to get people learning English :)

Since I’m not familiar with the tech invloved in this area tell me what’s wrong with the following plan(What is doable and what is not).
1.Like Thimal says agree on transliteration scheme Samanala .prune the alphabet to essential 32 letters.
2.Get 3-4 guys to blog once in a while using that.
3.Creat something like kottu.Create something to turn the above into sinhala graphic letters.Have the romanised sinhala and original sinhala side by side.

The end users don’t have to install anything.Text is searchable because of romanized letters.

am I out of my mind?

To be use useful (like Indi says)
1.It should be searchable (I have seen some searches in kottu.One guy was looking for “arpits of namked tamil women” I think.If this works the first search might be “Nuwara Baduwala Puke Pinthoora” or something!)
2.The end user shouldn’t have to install anything.

if 3-4 guys start writing regularly they can create “THE STANDARD’.

Ok, wait, I do know :) If that works for you, knock yourself out. I certainly don’t think many people would mind. I don’t, for one. I just can’t wait to hear the howls from the hawlas.

….

that was a bad pun, wasn’t it ? sorry.

It’s hardly a zero install/learning solution, but Samanala isn’t that hard. Trust me. Really. It’s a doddle. But umm, yeah. It does suck. One of the many downsides of being on the outer fringes of the computing world, at least till a few years ago.

It’ll change soon enough, I guess.. just not today :)

Or:
use one of the proprietary fonts (Kaputa, Kandy and a few others) .. which have similar encoding schemes.

In either case, you’ll need to install a special font on your machine if you don’t have the capability to render Sinhala chars already. And anyone who doesn’t have the font installed will see garbled chars at best.