			Anouncing the release of a
			    Demo Version of the
		    Indian Language Keyboard Program

THE PROGRAM
-----------

Typing text in an Indian Script is normally complicated by the fact that
vowels and consonants in Devanagari or Telugu or Kannada, etc., vary
their forms depending on the context they appear. Thus a single consonant
may have multiple forms, and the correct form to use generally depends
on the vowel or consonant that follows.

Using True Type or Type 1 fonts for Indian Scripts requires that users
memorize hundreds of glyph forms (character shapes), and it is left to the
user to pick the right glyph as required.

UNICODE is supposed to solve this problem, but UNICODE implementations
for Indian Scripts still seem to be many years away.

In the interim, here's a program that makes entering Indian Scripts
extremely easy.

All you need to remember is the basic vowels and consonants, and an
additional key that represents halant or viraam. You can then
construct any word you want, and the Indian Language Keyboard program
will pick up the correct glyphs to display, depending on the context of
the current vowel or consonant.

Remembering the keys is also made easy by phonetic placement of Indian
Language letters on the English keyboard.
Pairs such as KA-KHA, GA-GHA, CA-CHA, JA-JHA, TA-THA, etc each are
assigned to a single key.  Similarly the vowel inflections are also
matched phonetically to the English keys. All this makes the ASCII keyboard
very easy to use for entering text in any Indian Scripts.

One platform is currently supported (fonts are available in either
True Type or PostScript Type 1 formats):

1) MS-Windows 3.1 80x86 machines, with atleast 4M of memory.
   This version runs in the background and you can use it with any
   off-the-shelf word processor such as Word or WordPerfect.
   Since 1996, ILKEYB also supports Windows 95 and Word 95.

The Demo Version comes with a very simple Devanagari font (in
TrueType format).

NOTE: The Demo Devanagari font has many glyphs in it (nearly 150!), but
note that this is just a demo to show the contextual compositional
capabilities of the program; this font does not have all the
consonants---DHA, PA, and SA consonants are missing from the font.
But the font does contain a large number of consonant conjuncts and
various vowel modifiers, all of which are automatically displayed when
you use this program to enter text. See the Word document,
mntratbl.doc for examples of using this program.

For more information on the commercial version, see the file
"info.txt".

THE FONTS
---------

The Indian Language Fonts used by this program have been designed by
Shrikrishna Patil (Internet address: sapatil@aol.com).  Shrikrishna Patil
has been designing fonts for more than a decade now, and his fonts have
received praise from people in many countries.
(He received an award at the Brihan Maharashtra Mandal Convention 1993,
 for work relating to his fonts. Many marathi language publications in
 the US and Canada make use of his fonts.)

FTP SITES
---------

The MS-Windows Demo package is:

ilkbdm20.zip 

To obtain the FTP site names, send e-mail to me at <avinash@acm.org>
or visit my home page at:
    http://www.paranoia.com/~avinash/

CONTACT
-------

For more information regarding this program or regarding Indian Language
Fonts for the PC, contact:

Avinash Chopde <avinash@acm.org>
E-mail: avinash@acm.org
Home Page: http://www.paranoia.com/~avinash/
or
Shrikrishna Patil <sapatil@aol.com>

MORE DOCUMENTATION
------------------

The keyboard index and examples on how this program works is
provided in the Microsoft Word document, in a file named
"mntratbl.doc" (also available in WordPerfect and Rich Text File
version formats).

