Azhagi ( ta, அழகி) is a

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...

tool, which enables its users to type in a number of regional

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

n languages, including

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

, and others, using an English keyboard. In 2002,

The Hindu ''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...

dubbed Azhagi as a tool that "stand out" among various similar software "emerg ngnearly every other day".Alt URL
/ref> Since year 2000, Azhagi has provided support for Tamil transliteration; this was later expanded to nearly 13 Indian languages, featuring 16 total built-in languages as of the day of writing. In 2006, Azhagi was the recipient of the Manthan Award of India's Digital Empowerment Foundation and the World Summit Award project, in the category Localization. In the same year Azhagi was identified as a "success story" by Microsoft'
Bhashaindia.com
Indic language computing site.

Features

Azhagi is the first successful Tamil transliteration tool which has many users throughout the world. Azhagi helps the user to create and edit contents in several Indian languages including

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

, Konkani,

Gujarati Gujarati may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India * Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat * Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them * Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub ...

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

, Punjabi, Oriya and Assamese without having to know how to type in these languages. Text of these languages can be produced only typing the phonetic equivalent of English. Azhagi can be embedded for direct typing text of these languages in applications apart from

Notepad A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often Ruled paper, ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, diary, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbook ...

, including Microsoft products like MS Office,

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and also other applications all the

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s. Azhagi initially developed as a Tamil word processor having its own screen for typing contents in Tamil. The user can optionally select a dual screen or a single screen for transliteration. The Tamil text corresponding to the English text forming the phonetic equivalent of Tamil typed in the upper half of the screen is displayed in the lower half. This feature enables the user to ascertain the correctness of contents being typed. The single screen option can be chosen by users who have become familiar with the key mappings to be able to see larger portion of text than that seen in dual screen mode. The mapping summary that lists the English alphabets to be typed to get every Tamil alphabet is presented in the form of a concise table in the Azhagi Screen. This guides the new user who is yet to become familiar with the key mappings in finding the correct for every alphabet. The text displayed in Azhagi screen is with

TSCII Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange (TSCII) is a coding scheme for representing the Tamil script. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are TSCII-specific. After long years of being used on the Internet by pr ...

encoding. A

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

editor for typing Tamil text in

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

encoding with a separate display screen comes together with Azhagi. Azhagi has another novel application known as Azhagi+ that enables wider range of settings and options to the user. # Azhagi+ Enables typing in Indic languages in Windows XP in MS-Word, it doesn't require to enable Unicode explicitly. # It gives Portable Support so that one can use it from pen-drive itself # One can have one's own hotkey for any LFK (Language + Font + Keyboard Layout combination) (no need to be dependent on F10 which may not work in laptops if function key configurations are changed) # There is Dynamic in-built help for keymappings of all languages (no need to refer online help pages) # One can change existing key mappings in any manner for any LFK (Language +

Font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

Keyboard Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

Layout combination) in an easy and straightforward manner - quite unique among the

Indic computing Indic Computing means "computing in Indic", i.e., Indian Scripts and Languages. It involves developing software in Indic Scripts/languages, Input methods, Localization of computer applications, web development, Database Management, Spell check ...

# One can create one's own keyboard layout for any LFK.

Android Version

In 2016, Azhagi has launched the Mobile App for Android users with the custom transliteration feature. Though this app is created based on Indic Keyboard, it supports both the transliteration and transcription.

Development team

B. Vishwanathan, a software professional, developed Azhagi after he quit from

Tata Consultancy Services Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company with its headquarters in Mumbai. It is a part of the Tata Group and operates in 150 locations across 46 countries. In July ...

due to illness. During 1999, the

tools in Tamil had a lot of rough edges. Most importantly, it was not user-friendly. It was then, Viswanathan resolved to develop a user-friendly

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

-to-

transliteration software. Later in 2000, Azhagi was released and he named the software Azhagi, to symbolise his wife's 'beautiful' heart.

Support from users

Lot of websites, software, documents which uses the Tamil font make use of the Azhagi and it has support from the user and they are displaying their thanks giving note on their blogs and web pages. In addition to the transliteration tool, Azhagi also provides links to hundreds of free Tamil fonts in

, TAB and TAM format. It is recommended by lot of users and its popularity is also increased gradually.

Awards and recognition

* B. Vishwanathan was awarded the Manthan Award in 2006, for the development of dual screen transliteration tool Azhagi. * In July 2004
chennaionline
described B. Vishwanathan as a computer expert for his invention of Azhagi. * In November 2004
Nilacharal
described Vishwanathan as ''Thamizh Valarkkum Arignar'', which means, Tamil Developing Scholar for the invention of Azhagi.

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.azhagi.com/index.html
Azhagi Unofficial Blog

Azhagi
in

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Azhagi
in

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Tamil computing Freeware Translation software Indic computing Windows-only freeware