*Calling all programmers!*
I've been searching for an easy-to-use IME for transliterated Sanskrit/Pali, but everything seems either overly complicated or difficult to obtain, e.g. requiring a Mac or something else less universally applicable.
I have for the last few years been using an IME for transliterated Chinese, called Pinyinput (also available in a Mac version), which is extremely easy. You just type the letter followed by the numbers 1, 2, 3, or 4 to have the corresponding tone mark appear over your letter. It's so much easier than fiddling around with other methods.
Example:
Alt+Shift to toggle between IME. (In this case the Chinese appears.)
Śākyamuni = S2a1kyamuni
As you can see, it super fast and easy. However, as this is actually for Chinese it only has a couple of the diacritical marks needed in Sanskrit/Pali; namely the accute ( ´ ) and the macron ( ¯ ).
All that would be needed to modify this system for Sanskrit/Pali would be the tilde ( ˜ ) and the dot ( . ) below/above consonants.
When I spoke with the developer of Pinyinput about it he said;
Unfortunately, I lack the techsaviness for this type of thing. So hopefully either we can find a developer on here who might be willing to do the modifications, or if we can get enough people to pledge a donation toward a Kickstarter project for this to be done...Pinyinput was written in C++ and the source code has been released under the GPL so is available for anyone else to download and/or modify if they wish, so long as they also release the source code for their changes.
It compiles cleanly using Visual Studio Express 2008 and is fairly modular, so I don't expect it would be too hard for someone who knew what they were doing to adapt it for another writing system.
This has been extremely invaluable for me in the Chinese version for essays, papers, discussions, etc.. Just wish we could have a version of it for Sanskrit/Pali input.
Anyone into it?
