I am deeply disturbed and saddened by the growing number of innocent casualties in the profoundly inhumane and insane war currently being waged between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

This is my protest against the Israeli siege of Gaza, their use of disproportionate mass-casualty weapons and their crippling sanctions in Gaza. I fail to see how such action is conducive to attaining a lasting solution. The most probable outcome we could expect from this course of action, perhaps, is for it to breed anger and even hatred amongst those affected - something we all could live happier without. This is also my protest against the exploitation of the civilian population and dwellings by Hamas in their military activities against Israel.

As a firm pacifist, it appalls me to see the eagerness towards violence, by both these groups of people, as a means to solve their disputes and disagreements. It appalls me that both parties continue the violence despite the growing fatalities and injuries. It appalls me that the world powers have let the situation continue to deteriorate without stepping in.

My heart goes out to all those people caught up in this conflict...

Thaana Transcoder is a Windows-based tool that performs the often much needed conversion of Thaana text written in Accent, Faseyha Thaana, MS Word version 97 (and older) to and from the modern Unicode standard used by MS Word XP/2007 and OpenOffice. This program hasn't been thoroughly tested and there is bound to be bugs and errors. If you do encounter such a bug or have a feature request, please drop me line.

Quite a few people have asked me for such a program over the years and I used to point people over to an online tool I had made available a few years ago but it is no longer alive. As ever, it wasn't until I had a real necessity for such a program a few days ago that I got around to writing a brand new version.

Download

- Thaana Transcoder 1.0 Installer (184KB, MS Windows)
- Latin Thaana Transcoder 1.0 Executable only (78.8KB, MS Windows)

Enjoy

Here's a minor update to my Javascript Thaana Keyboard library. This release, version 4.2, amounts to a single bugfix addressing an error in key translation for some keys when operating under the "Phonetic-HH" keyboard mode. Everything else remains as per the earlier v4 series releases.

Thanks goes to Nattu for bringing the bug to my attention.

Changelog:

+ Fixed handling of keys when in Phonetic-HH keyboard mode

Usage:

Usage remains same as before. Please refer to my detailed post on the 4.0 release.

Demo:

Check out the demonstration and testing page here.

Download:

- full source version (5.51 KB)
- packed version (2.46 KB) [recommended]

I published an article last year, titled "Guide to using Thaana on the WWW", with the aim of presenting a quick overview of the various approaches/methods for developing Thaana-based websites. It introduced 6 different methods and included enough implementation details to help a beginner get started. I've now rewritten bits of the article for increased clarity and also added some examples to help fortify the usage instructions.

Click here to read the updated article.

I dug up this old project from my backup disks today and worked a little magic to bring it back to life. This was and still is among my favourite experiments. Named "Athuliyun", I developed this software shortly after I bought my first PDA around 2005, with the goal of getting Thaana handwriting recognition on the platform. I didn't have much experience with software development for Windows CE (a.k.a Windows Mobile) and so it ended up being a Windows application. The project got binned when my interests moved to Optical Character Recognition for document scanning...

Athuliyun supports, as it stands now, the Thaana characters but not the filis (diacritics). This ofcourse severely limits its practical use but I reckon adding support for fili would be a relatively trivial task. I will be releasing this publicly, hopefully later this month, after adding that functionality and also retraining the recognition neural networks used in the software for improved performance.

Anyway, below is a short screencast of the application where you can see me scribble Thaana letters quite clumsily using the touchpad on my laptop - let's call it a software/technology preview