Azhagi.com - Love ALL Serve ALL - A thanks'giving page to ALL those selfless enthusiasts and also commercial entities who have given their level best for Tamil/Indic computing and its promotion.

Herebelow, you can find various other softwares and tools developed by various other selfless individuals and also commercial enterprises to aid in Indic computing (i.e. computing in Indian languages like Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.). You can also read my short or detailed comments/reviews on few of the softwares. In this connection, kindly please read spread.html to see what best you can do to spread the news of Azhagi and all softwares of its kind, for the benefit of the global society.

I take this opportunity to offer my very sincere and utmost appreciation and gratitude to all developers of beneficial softwares and people who serve humanity in general.

Azhagi Downloads

Azhagi-Setup.exe

Azhagi-Setup.zip

Operating Modes

Tamil softwares and tools

My sincere appreciation to all the developers of the Tamil/Indic softwares/tools mentioned in the above lists. And, thanks to the editors of the abovementioned websites who have compiled such lists and hosted them for the benefit of all.

Dictionaries - English to Tamil and Tamil to English

I wholeheartedly thank all those involved in the above dictionary projects which look wonderful, to say the least. Please note that Google's 2-way dictionary is available for many other world languages too, incl. Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, etc.

Free Tamil Fonts - 100s of them - in various encodings

Click here to get more free Tamil fonts - 100s of them - in Tscii, Unicode, TAB, TAM and various other font encodings.

I take this opportunity to offer my sincere appreciation to all the developers of free Tamil fonts.

Free Tamil Fonts Converters

Click here to reach a section below in this same page wherein I have listed some softwares of great use. Some of them do 'tamil fonts conversion' - like Suratha, Higopi, NHM, Elcot and Sarma's products. You can choose the one which meets your requirements.

Thanks to the developers of Tamil fonts converters. Please note that Azhagi does Unicode to Tscii, Tscii to Unicode and Tscii to TAB conversions.

Softwares and online tools for computing in Tamil and various other Indian languages:

You can find most of the sites mentioned below having been already listed in one of the 2 comprehensive lists you find at the top of this page. However, I have highlighted them herebelow so that you don't miss out.

http://baraha.com
A single man Sheshadrivasu's very noble contribution to this humanity - A quality 'Indian Languages' Word processor - 100% free - Since 2000. I am sure lakhs of people (multilingual) must have got benefitted from Baraha since 2000. A lofty work indeed from Mr.Sheshadrivasu!
http://thamizha.com/ekalappai-anjal
A free Tamil word processor. It has it's own Unicode text processing engine.
http://www.higopi.com/tools
Friendly Gopi's free online Indian language transliterator, very useful firefox plugins for indic computing, transliteration scripts for integration in websites, and many other tools. You can save his transliterator (as a webpage - just like you normally save other webpages) and access it offline too.
http://sarma.co.in, http://auw.sarma.co.in and http://tamil.sarma.co.in
Tamil word processor - with a large dictionary, Tamil spell checker, Tamil grammar checker!, 120 Tamil fonts converter, 18 different Tamil keyboard layouts and what not! Loaded with features... Fabulous stuff! Please read this related Microsoft BhashaIndia story on exceedingly talented Mr.Ibrahim.
http://software.nhm.in
A free Tamil (and other Indian languages) word processor. It can enable Unicode settings automatically in your system, upon installation. NHM provides a separate Tamil fonts converter tool too. The same is available as an online service here
http://bhashaindia.com
Microsoft's portal - a one'stop center for all information and resources related to Indic computing
http://ildc.in
Indian Language Data Centre - Free fonts and tools for various Indian languages
http://www.elcot.in/tamilfonts_download_list.php
A free fonts converter tool from Elcot
http://www.jaffnalibrary.com/tools/Unicode.htm
PonguTamil free online Tamil transliterator. It can be saved (as a webpage - just like you normally save other webpages) and accessed offline too.
http://suratha.com/reader.htm
Suratha's free online Tamil fonts converter. It can be saved (as a webpage - just like you normally save other webpages) and accessed offline too.
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/software/utils/tconvert.php
An utility to convert ITrans, RIT and Adhawin files
http://murasu.com
A Tamil word processor which works in Mac platform also. Helps input Tamil in mobiles, ipods and similar devices too.
Shakti Office
A Tamil and Hindi word processor.
http://quillpad.com
A free-form online transliterator for all major Indian languages. As far as Tamil is concerned, I found it extremely intelligent and very easy while typing certain words but could not type certain other words at all. Like Google, Quillpad also provides widgets (both free and commercial) for integrating it's transliterator into any website. Quillpadmobile.in - provides you a tool to help you type (vide transliteration) in Hindi in mobile phones. It is reported that support for other Indian languages also will be provided by it's developers very soon.
http://google.com/transliterate/indic
Google's free online transliterator for various Indian languages. As far as I see it, it's based on a transliteration dictionary, fundamentally, and hence very user-friendly and fast. But, personally, as of now, I find this system very fast/friendly for typing out a few lines, but for large amounts of texts, editing (to correct mistakes in texts already typed out) becomes quite tedious. Nevertheless, for typing out a few sentences (as is the need for many in this busy world, for quick chats and email messages) online, it's great and can prove to be an extremely effective/handy tool. In the future, I expect/wish this tool to become 100% easy during editing also, and become more versatile (available for use in all applications in all OSes) so that many more get to benefit from this user-friendly tool.

N.B.:
1. As of Aug 2009, SAT mode has been introduced in Azhagi, which is akin to Google's Indic Transliteration. For details, please see http://azhagi.com/sath.html.
2. As of Jan 18 2010, I see that Google has extended its free online transliteration service to offline mode too. i.e. One can download (for free) and use google's transliterator to type directly in Tamil (and several other languages) in ANY Windows application. That's nice. I downloaded and tried out the IME(input method editor) immediately and it's excellent. The editing process is also less tedious than it was earlier (when tested with the online version). In fact, I see that Microsoft also has come out with a similar tool (free and advertised as beta) and it's here. I tried the same just a while ago and it is very good for typing. Compared to Google, it gives less Tamil equivalents for a word typed but seems to be more intelligent in choosing the best word amongst alternatives sometimes; the editing process is more tedious than that of google but I am sure this area will be improved/perfected in versions to come. Also, as newbies and other users get used to these "free-form transliterators", they may perhaps easily learn to type their original texts itself without mistakes and hence their later editing/correction needs might be less. Well, all said and done, the bottom-line is that it augurs well to see that both established companies Google and Microsoft have now come out with a transliterator, at last, that works in all applications, that too with many language options. This will spread the awareness of language transliterators amongst computer users at a mighty rapid pace and that's a heartening and great development indeed, benefitting the global society! I hope now that language translators, voice recognition softwares, etc. also will get developed sooner than later. In this context, please read inno.html

I take this opportunity to offer my sincere appreciation to all the developers of softwares/tools for computing in various Indian languages.

'Learn Tamil' Tools

I offer my deep gratitude to Mr.Pollachi Nasan (Editor, thamizham.net) for his above single-handed efforts in providing such excellent tools on learning/teaching Tamil.

'Learn Tamil' Blog

Very many thanks for ever to the author of the 'learning-tamil' blog - particularly, you can find various Tamil learning resources in the 2nd link above.

'Learn English through Tamil'

Free lessons in Tamil, to learn English

One has to profusely thank the author of 'aangilam' blog for his unique and very useful service.

'Learn HTML in Tamil'

There are lots of HTML tutorials in English. But, the tutorial available here in ezilnila.com is in Tamil (in 7 lucid parts) and moreover, it teaches HTML in a style (akin to teaching 'a, b, c, d' to children) which any layman/laywoman can easily understand and start creating html pages within minutes.

I immensely thank (Late) Sri. Umar and Ezilnila Mahen for this wonderful and exceedingly worthy contribution which many of our sisters and brothers who aspire to create html pages will find extremely useful.

'Thirukkural' online

Read (with meanings) and Search on Thirukkurals

There might be many online sites available offering Thirukkurals with their meanings but Gokulnath's site (a very neat design and presentation) is definitely worth seeing, esp. for it's very versatile and well thought-out 'search' functionality.

'Text to Speech' Softwares

Immense thanks should go to the above for the initiative taken in a 'special' area. The value of the above tools for educational presentations (and kind) and especially their help for the sight-impaired is immeasurable. Collectively, these tools perform text-to-speech conversion for Tamil, Hindi, Kannada and several other world languages.

Out of the above three, I found the iisc (first in the list) tool to be very good (with respect to nativity and understandability) and thanks for those who sponsor(ed) the iisc project. For my personal experience with the above softwares, kindly visit http://azhagi.com/tts.html. My observations/notes might be of help to you or some other needy person whom you know. Regarding Azhagi's initiative in Tamil 'Text 2 Speech', since 2001, please see http://azhagi.com/sath.html#tts.

In the above context, please read my message posted in 'Azhagi' google and yahoo group on Jul 31 2009 and Aug 1 2009 resp.

Group message sources:
http://groups.google.com/group/azhagi/browse_thread/thread/3d6229f5f0447ba5
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/azhagi/message/489

Dear Friends,

Warm greetings!

As and when your time/interest permits, kindly please have a look at http://azhagi.com/indic.html. I have done whatever best possible by me (as of now) for spreading awareness of ALL softwares/tools available for computing in Tamil and other Indian languages, with links to all of them. This is apart from informing about them to others through personal mails, phone calls, etc. too, as ever.

It's my thanks-giving and 'awareness-spreading' page for ALL available softwares/tools (both commercial and non-commercial) so that many more get to benefit by using these softwares/tools, since, in my past 10 years' experience, I have seen that 1000s and 1000s are not yet aware of such softwares/tools, though they are in need of the same.

A link ( Other Softwares | Tools ) for the aforesaid 'indic.html' page has been given at the top right of www.azhagi.com website and also from within Azhagi software itself. i.e. every visitor of azhagi.com or user of 'azhagi' software has ready access to all softwares/tools available for Indian language computing.

I have written/mentioned about the abovesaid 'indic.html' page in some of my earlier mails also. But, not sure whether everybody would have read them. Also, new members perhaps may not have read those mails. Hence, I have written again. Thanks, for sparing your valuable time.

If possible and if your time/interest permits, kindly spread the news of the abovementioned softwares/tools in the best way possible for you...

With sincere prayers for the welfare of all beings...

Love all Serve all

Kind Regards
B.Viswanathan, Author (Azhagi - www.azhagi.com)

Please note:
In 2004, in an interview given to a webzine, I had this to say. User requests for a Tamil translator or a Voice recognition software or Azhagi in Linux/MAC or ... or ... have been existing ever since 2000 itself. For those users to get an understanding on what it takes to develop these softwares and also as a sort of a detailed sequel to what I had opined in 2004, I compiled inno.html. If interested, you may read it.